On Compassion, Healing, Suffering, and the Purpose of the Emotional Life

Susan Wessel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501344541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Reading Augustine presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religion scholars. Augustine of Hippo knew that this fallen world is a place of sadness and suffering. In such a world, he determined that compassion is the most suitable and virtuous response. Its transformative powers could be accessed through the mind and its memories, through the healing of the Incarnation, and through the discernment of Christians who are forced to navigate through a corrupt and deceptive world. Susan Wessel considers Augustine's theology of compassion by examining his personal experience of loss and his reflections concerning individual and corporate suffering in the context of the human condition and salvation.

1

Provocation

Compassion is the soul of Christianity. It is connected to every aspect of life, and its presence, or absence, shapes one’s experience of the world. In support of this ideal, the Gospels record numerous instances of Jesus exercising compassion to heal those whose suffering he witnessed. Early Christian preachers urged their congregations to follow Jesus’ example by compassionately embracing their fellow human beings and by providing the churches with the financial means to care for the sick and poor.

The acts of compassion that Christians are supposed to emulate never were merely the practical embodiment of an ethical obligation. They are in imitation and illustrative of the healings and exorcisms that Jesus performed to manifest the kingdom of God.¹ To be made aware of and to feel compassion for the suffering of others is to participate in Jesus’ healing ministry and to witness the ushering in of his kingdom. When carried out appropriately, compassionate emotions have the potential to alter the fabric of the cosmos. The feelings and actions that are the consequence of identifying with the suffering of another human being signal the power of God breaking through the evil aspects of the world and the demonic taking flight.²

The Graeco-Roman Context

Christians were not the only ones in antiquity busy with the possibilities for compassionate healing. The Greek god of medicine, Aesclepius, the philosophers argued, was one such divine power that offered the healing of body and soul to those who slept in his temples. Inscriptions and statues testify that those seeking cures brought gifts and even consecrated their lives to him as to a god and savior. The cult that bore his name presented enough of a challenge to Jesus’ ministry that the early Christians disputed the source and purpose of its powers. While Origen of Alexandria (d. c.253) conceded that a demon named Aesclepius healed physical ailments, he cautioned those impressed by the healings that “the cure of bodies is impartial, as it is a characteristic not only of the good, but also of the wicked.”³ The quarrel lay not with the cult’s potential to effect legitimate healing, but with its moral insignificance and its apparent demonic inspiration. One of the early Christians’ harshest critics, the neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry (d. c.305), agreed that healing was not evidence, in and of itself, of divine operation. Rather than healing the body, the aim of philosophy was the salvation of the soul. Like many of the ancient Greeks before him, he imagined salvation only for the souls of the intelligent and just.

This is precisely where the early Christians distinguished themselves from the preoccupations of the pagan world. Unlike the pagan healers who had little interest in the underclass of Roman civilization, Jesus came into the world to heal the broken, the outcasts, the sick and injured, the destitute, and the downtrodden whose physical and economic condition set them apart from society and excluded them from participating in religious life. Jesus acknowledged the ravages of, and then compassionately healed, human misery in all its forms. As a physician for the body, he healed its material suffering; as a physician for the soul, he restored its moral integrity and relationship to God. Both types of compassionate healing were accomplished, in the course of his ministry and by his death on the cross, without Christianity ever being defined primarily as a healing religion.

The cult of Aesclepius, in contrast, was such a cult of healing. It had little interest in examining the social and religious dimensions of its cures and even less interest in the interior moral life of its clients. In spite of the competition that such cults posed for the emerging church, or perhaps even because of it, there was “little attempt to exploit for apologetic purposes specific instances of Christian healing in an age in which testimonies to miraculous cures by pagan gods were common.”⁴ Though pagan opponents to the faith would claim that the magic of such men as the Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana (d. c.100), and the Latin rhetorician and philosopher Apuleius (d. c.170), was greater than the miracles performed by Christ, there was a certain reluctance to engage with such objections head on.⁵ Christianity was not simply one healing cult among many in the Roman world. To present its cures alongside those offered by the pagan gods would have rhetorically undermined the uniqueness of its mission. In this regard it was better to leave well enough alone. Physical healing was the consequence, rather than the focus, of the Christian ministry. It was the visible and material manifestation of God’s kingdom breaking through the evil rulership of this world.

The perception of power among the early Christians differed from that of their pagan counterparts who participated in healing cults. Whereas the pagans perceived power in terms of the present social hierarchy they submitted to, the early Christians were more rebellious. Inspired by the eschatological reversals of Jesus’ ministry—where “the last will be first and the first will be last”—they recognized fluid relationships of power between “the haves” and “the have nots,” between the elite and those excluded from ordinary social life, between the observer of human suffering and the sufferer.

Christian healing took place amid the larger theological questions that these reversals of the power structure posed for the spiritual life of ordinary Christians. From the stories the Gospels told, they noticed that the physical suffering of the body was only part of what Jesus had healed. They saw how Jesus had reintroduced social and religious outcasts, including the abject poor and the lepers, into the sacramental life of the church. He had also renegotiated the boundaries between human experience and divine sovereignty by encouraging people to consider what it meant to have been made in the image of God.⁶ And by challenging them to examine the quality and intent of their moral decisions, he prioritized the interior dimension of their spiritual life and ethical commitments.

A further difference was in the conviction that the source of Jesus’ power was God and that its purpose was the eradication of the demonic entities that wreaked havoc upon, and of the evil that ruled, this world. I have already suggested that the miraculous healings, which often reexamined social and religious norms, were a manifestation of the kingdom of God. The early Christians sensed that the healing of the physical body would not suffice to prepare them for the social, spiritual, and moral reversals that the presence of God’s kingdom implied. It required a deeper examination of their interior motivations and of their experiences with respect to human suffering and to the ways in which such suffering mirrored and related to Christ’s suffering on the cross.

In the light of this developing and multifaceted examination of their interior world, the early Christians wondered how they were supposed to connect with, experience, and react emotionally to the suffering they witnessed. Preachers responded with sermons encouraging a passionate connection with human misery. Jesus in his ministry had, after all, modeled such a connection. The Gospels record several instances of his feeling empathy for the people he had miraculously cured. Likewise, his agony in the Garden of Olives and his subsequent death on the cross were felt compassionately and on behalf of human suffering.

This was in contrast with the legacy Greek and Roman pagans had left with respect to the emotional dimensions of pity and its application across societal boundaries. The contexts in which pity could be legitimately expressed were in the social, rather than the emotional, structures and relationships between and among human beings. It was appropriate to feel pity for those among the upper classes who had experienced a sudden reversal of fortune, but not for the members of the lower classes in need of charity.⁷ Among the pagans, pity reinforced social boundaries, rather than challenged them. Gary Ferngren has remarked, “pity was shown by those who, on the one hand, could sympathize with members of their own class in need and, on the other, might hope to build up a fund of good will in case they should experience a similar misfortune.”⁸ It is worth noting that the operation of such ideals did not prevent individual pagans from feeling pity for the suffering they witnessed, only that the emotional experience was neither normalized nor encouraged.⁹ With no one among the literary elite committed to articulating the individual and emotional dimensions of pity, there was no explicit Greek and Roman tradition for the early Christians to draw upon.

The Jewish tradition was more fertile in this regard. For example, the Greek-speaking Jewish historian Josephus (37 CE–c.100 CE), like the Hellenistic historians of his day, explored the emotional aspects of the lives he recounted in his histories. He explained the actions of characters by their emotions, he portrayed characters according to the way they handled emotions, he interrupted the narrative to reflect upon emotional experiences, and he considered which emotion an event should provoke.¹⁰ The anonymous Testament of Zebulun (1st–2nd century CE) deepened this exploration of emotional experience by considering how Zebulun—the last son of the biblical patriarch Jacob—responded to the suffering he witnessed. We are told that he distributed the fish he caught among strangers, prepared it for those in even greater need, and offered garments to a man he found naked in the winter. In all cases, his actions are described as compassionate, in some cases they involve the empathy of shared grief, and they are always rewarded with God’s beneficence.

The early Christians received and developed this tradition of compassionate suffering in the context of Jesus’ ministry. From the book of Genesis they knew that human beings were made in the image of God; from the Gospels they knew that this included the sick, the destitute, and the outcasts of Roman society. Early Christian preachers drew upon this unequivocal truth to motivate their congregations to perform charitable acts and to engage directly and emotionally with human suffering. In this regard they were unique.

While the ancient Greeks performed charity, it was based upon civic notions of virtue, rather than the innate dignity of the human person. The Stoics differed from the ancient Greeks in acknowledging an intrinsic humanitarian impulse that was grounded in reason and that distinguished human beings from the beasts.¹¹ Yet such universal values did not promise the reversal of well-entrenched social norms. According to Marcia Colish, one such advocate of the principles of a Stoic humanitarianism, the Roman satirist Juvenal contained “his egalitarianism and fellow-feeling … within certain elastic limits marked off by class, nationality, and sex.”¹² Early Christian preachers challenged their congregations to reconsider such artificial boundaries when contemplating the appropriateness of compassionate feeling across the range of human suffering.

Emotions and Meaning

Among the early Christians, Augustine was especially adept at examining and articulating the interior life of the Christian in the context of compassion, healing, and suffering. He knew that feeling compassion for human suffering results in acts of charity and understanding that imitate the boundless love of God. This connection between feeling and charitable action generates all sorts of possibilities for spiritual transformation in the encounter between God and human beings. When attuned to the right frequency, unencumbered emotions serve as the gateway from this world to the next. The spiritual healing that takes place in the course of this transmission is what we call salvation.

This chapter will follow Augustine’s emotional life from his early years as an auditor among the Manichaeans, to the emotional provocation he experienced while reading pagan literature and attending the theater, to the divinely chiseled emotions he felt while reading the Psalms. Over the course of this trajectory, Augustine learned that emotional experiences did not always need to be suppressed. Under the right circumstances, they could be spiritually transformative. For Augustine, this is especially the case when feelings of compassion or distress prompt people to call upon God, in this way triggering the conditions that make salvation possible.

Like the unfiltered, and sometimes unpredictable, emotions Augustine studied, his path toward understanding the nuances of emotional provocation did not progress in a linear manner. Reflecting upon the pain of personal loss and the challenge of spiritual conversion helped Augustine reassess the meaning he assigned to his emotional life over the course of time. Emotions were not merely unwelcome feelings that needed to be suppressed. When focused in the right direction and on the appropriate object, they could be transformed into alignment with the compassionate love of God. The process of reflection helped him reinterpret and then integrate past experiences and emotions into his developing sense of himself as a Christian. With the shifting landscape of his self...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Provocation
• 2 Sadness
• 3 Suffering
• 4 Remembering
• 5 Healing
• 6 Accommodation
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint