Talking About Talking About Suffering

A Preface to John Cassian on the Eight Principal Faults

Centering our experience of suffering is a way of missing what suffering is about.

It’s clear to me that talking about our suffering is one of the hallmarks of our literary age. It is the best-seller list, non-fiction and fiction, history and self-help. Suffering and our explorations of what it is and what it does to us suffuses Substack, permeates political discourse, dominates book catalogs. It is the air in which we try to get a clean breath, only to have the echoes of our suffering—spoken back to us—or the suffering of another—spoken our way—cloud our lungs.

Were I more inclined toward cynicism, I would trace the rise of suffering-discourse to the political world that drowns us all, that all persons in modern societies are viewed first and foremost as victims to be protected. But I try to resist that siren song. Perhaps the answer is mimesis: as creatures, we mimic that which we see others being socially rewarded for. Or possibly the rise of suffering-writing has to do with the modern drive for recognition: that we desire to be seen, and naming our wounds for others is part of how others come to see us at all.

All of these, I think, are plausible reasons why suffering is so on display. For one, there just is a great deal of suffering in the world, and technology allows us to be more aware of it than we used to be. There is no avoiding the starvation, the mass death and misery of millions of people half a world away, suffering which has no direct effect on how I watch my kids’ baseball games: technologies will make sure I know. But the Internet doesn’t create the stories—at least not yet anyway!—it simply replicates them for billions of eyeballs.

But as ubiquitous as suffering-discourse is, it is nothing new. All of the phenomenon which I named above—citizens as those-in-need-of-protection, of mimetic action, of recognition through one’s wounds—are found in ancient literature.

Consider The Illiad—the whole of the work turns on what is owed to the warrior Achilles and the dishonor given him by King Agamemnon. It is grievance literature which become mimicry, as warriors take from one another inspiration of how to die brutally, carved from armpit to navel in the Trojan sun. And this mimicry becomes how we know the names of the dead: line after line is devoted to pithy summations of this warrior’s life and aspirations, just before he is skewered by a spear or cleaved in two by the wrath of the gods. It is a work of suffering par excellence, in which the way a person is known, given honor, and named is by their willingness to suffer the caprice of the gods and the fickleness of fortune.

Consider religious accounts of the self, from Augustine to Julian of Norwich to Beth Moore: a standard narrative emerges in which the protagonist suffers great trauma and difficulty, overcomes it by the grace of God, often through a narrative twist, learns great lessons, and rests into the present. In these works, suffering is on display in ways which inspire the reader, put their author’s life on specific display, and characterize them as sinners to be vindicated by God. What is as old as the epic poem of Homer returns anew, until Tik Tok made even dramatic displays of suffering banal.

More problematic is this shift: suffering is now not just a form of identification: it is a form of argument. To contrast the Illiad with the present on this point: there are many fools who die, and Homer is quick to remind us that not all whose blood was spilled at Troy were wise. To have undergone unjust suffering provides far-reaching validation, a conferring of wisdom by others not because of what one gained through suffering, but of having suffered. The material issues change, but the underlying dynamic remains: having undergone suffering now grants authority, not because one has been transfigured or changed by the experience, but because one survived it.

Photo by Yaopey Yong on Unsplash

John Cassian, a 5th century monk and cataloguer of monastic wisdom, provides story after story of monks who were fools, who struggled mightily with shape-shifting demons, who were saints. Their faults are on display. Their straightforward presumptions about the dangers and difficulty of the spiritual life are before us. Over the next few weeks, through Easter and beyond, we will look at Cassian’s Institutes, in which he writes about eight major faults and how to overcome them.

But in his two major works, the notable departure from what I’ve laid out is that suffering simply is, and there is no overt valor in it. That the world is full of traps and snares is presumed; that the emperors are fickle and that people are duplicitious are features and not bugs. And as such, the suffering that we undergo as we seek the life of holiness is in fact nothing special in and of itself. That they have suffered does not confer authority or exalt them, nor is their ability to endure a wrestling match with a desert demon of envy. To overcome the machinations of a demon is the least one can do, and if you mistake a demon for an angelic visitation, well—that’s on you, my dude¹.

That we presume that suffering is something, in our own day, to be celebrated for having gone through says something important, but not particularly flattering. It says that we presume that ordinary life is not to be one of suffering, or perhaps that leisure is that which is the ordinary state, punctuated by seasons of great effort.

Or perhaps—following our earlier thread—it is that our relations with one another are wrapped up in pleasure and not in struggle: pleasure becomes the unifying factor, such that seeing a person distinctly requires some not-pleasure to attach to them, some scar or some struggle. We live in an age which has built in buffers at every turn to reduce our suffering, such that perhaps suffering—even exaggerated or celebrated suffering for its own sake—is our way of reaching for a world beyond the buffer.

The question before the monks in these chapters is not if suffering happens. It strikes me as important that they find their own sufferings—manifold as they are—not particularly interesting, at least by comparison. They are far more interested in the wisdom that they encounter from God, the virtues that infuse their bones, the encounter with God that occurs as they do the ordinary work of holiness. That they suffer is just part of what it means to be God’s beloved creature.

1. See ch. 7 of the linked text.