Socrates in the City: Conversations on Life, God and Other Small Topics

A second thinker who takes suffering very, very seriously is Buddha, one of the greatest psychologists of all time. He based an entire— well, we can’t quite call it religion; we can’t quite call it philosophy (Buddhists don’t quite find familiarity or comfort in those two terms)— but he based his entire religion-philosophy system upon four noble truths, the first of which is that to live is to suffer— the trauma of birth, the trauma of disappointment, the trauma of pain, the trauma of death. Life is trauma.

His whole religion— if you want to call it that— is geared toward salvation from suffering, and his startlingly simple diagnosis is that to end suffering, you must end its cause. Its cause is egotism, or selfish desire, but in his psychology, the ego or ego-consciousness and egotism are inseparable, and therefore, you must see through the ego as an illusion and transform consciousness.

Let’s contrast Buddha to Christ, who also takes suffering very seriously and claims that he comes to address this problem. But his solution, like that of Frankl, is more a deed than a thought like Buddha’s, and contrasting to Buddha, his way is a way into suffering, not out of it. Christ also claims to be a way of salvation, but the problem for him is not so much suffering but sin. It’s a different sort of thing. That vaguely has something or other— philosophers like to be vague at first, before they hone in on exact definitions— to do with the whole moral order, and that brings us back to Socrates, who famously taught in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do it.

In other words, suffering isn’t so bad. Sin is worse. It is much worse to do evil than to suffer it. That sounds hopelessly idealistic. If you had the choice between doing something a little wicked— let’s say, cheating the IRS on your income tax or being tortured and roasted over a barbecue spit for thirteen hours straight— unless you’re very unusual, I can predict what you would choose. What in the world could he possibly have meant by saying, “It is better to suffer evil than to do it”?

Well, Socrates had this notion that at the essence of a person was this thing called the soul or the self, rather than just the body. He taught, almost with his last words, that no evil can ever happen to a good man, whether in this life or in the next— a very strange thing to say, because clearly he is a good man and he has just been unfairly condemned, misunderstood, sentenced to death, put into prison, and his life is taken from him. That’s as bad a thing as we can do to people. So, what could he mean by “no evil could happen to a good man”? He’s in the middle of evil happening to a good man, and he says, “It doesn’t really happen.”

To the question “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Socrates’s answer is “They never do.” What in the world could he mean by that? It sounds absurd— a person is the soul, and evil never happens to the soul. It happens to the body.

You know that two-word bumper sticker that summarizes all of human history with such eloquence: It happens. By the way, do you know where that came from? There’s a real story behind that. Sometime in the sixties, there was a farmer walking across a cornfield in Kansas, minding his own business. It was a nice June day; somewhere out of the sky came something that crashed into his head, blew his brains out, and killed him. It was a two-foot square of frozen detritus, which had worked its way loose from a rusty airliner toilet. I can just imagine that family tradition: “Mommy, how did Grandpa die?” “Well, you know, kid, it happens.”

But that only happens to the body. It doesn’t happen to the soul. “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul.” Oh, great evil can be done to the soul, indeed, but I am the agent of it. I am the agent and responsible for folly and vice, not you.

Once Socrates realized that, he could die with a smile. Jesus said something a bit similar, although, as a Jew, Jesus takes the body much more seriously, because it’s part of the image of God and God created it and Jesus doesn’t have this dualism that the Greeks had between body and soul. But Jesus too said— what seems, to me, the single most practical sentence uttered in the history of the world— “What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own self?”

None of the aforementioned remarks are meant to be a solution to the problem of suffering. They are meant to hone in on its centrality. There are two parts, or forms, to the problem of suffering— one is practical, and one is theoretical.

The practical one is what can we do about it, and we have come up with a number of answers, all of which are inadequate. For example, in Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud raises the wonderful question “Why, now that we have become gods, aren’t we happy?” He says we don’t need gods or God anymore, because we’ve got technology. Technology has attained the wishful thinking that produced religion. We would like to be above the thunder and lightning, knowing it and controlling it like Zeus. Instead, we cower in superstitious fear in caves, thinking that the thunderstorm is the wrath of an angry God. We’ve become God; so, we need not fear. We are Mercury sending messages through space at will. Since we’ve become gods, since these natural human desires have been attained, we certainly should be happier, because happiness is the fundamental desire, but we’re not. The more civilized we are, the more happy we are? Oh, no, not at all.

Freud even toys for a while with Rousseau’s notion that the more civilized we are, the more unhappy we are, and that we would be happier to go back to being a noble savage, which, of course, is impossible. It’s a great question, and Freud confesses honestly, as a good scientist, that he doesn’t know the answer to it.

So, practically speaking, we have not come up with an answer to the problem of suffering. The only thing we can do about suffering is to live through it. To live is to suffer.

So, let’s look at the theoretical problem, the logic of the problem: Why must we suffer? Explain it. Maybe you can’t solve it, but at least let’s explain it. It makes a difference whether God is thrown into the equation. Suppose you’re a Marxist. What’s the cause of suffering? Inadequate social structures, class conflict. What can be done about it? They can be modified. Something like a heaven on earth can be attained by a bloody revolution, but you still have to die and you still have pain nerves all over your body.

Theoretically, the problem comes in much greater if you believe in God. If suffering just happens, then it just happens; but if the whole of our selves and our lives and our universe is a design— a deliberate design, not an accident— a novel written by God, then why does he write such a lousy novel? Thus, Job, the classic sufferer, the classic philosopher in suffering, would not have nearly the passion, including the intellectual passion, if he didn’t have God to get angry at. Perhaps one of the things God wants us to do is to get angry with him, because that makes us similar to Socrates. It makes us ask questions. I don’t think God likes pop psychologists that tell you, “Accept yourself as you are”; in other words, “Be a vegetable.”

I have never found an atheist who can state the problem of evil with the logical cogency and force and personal passion of a theist. The most sympathetic case for atheism in the history of the world, it seems to me, has been made by one of the great theistic writers, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ivan Karamazov is the most persuasive atheist in the world’s literature. I tell my students, “If your faith is weak and you’re afraid to lose it, don’t read The Brothers Karamazov.”

I often teach philosophy of religion, and I play Socrates. I try to get the class to dialogue. I divide them into two groups— believers and unbelievers, or believers and skeptics, or strong believers and weak believers. Once I get the two groups, I say, “Now, we’re going to dialogue about whether there’s a God, but those of you who classify yourselves as believers, you’re going to have to argue for atheism. And you who classify yourselves as unbelievers, you’re going to have to argue for theism.” They say, “That’s ridiculous,” and I say, “No, it isn’t. If you don’t understand the other position, you can’t really argue against it.”

I’ve done this three or four times. It’s always turned out exactly the same way. There’s no discernible difference in the intelligence level between the atheists and the theists, but the atheists always make a ridiculously weak case for theism and the theists always make a knock-’em-down, drag-’em-out case for atheism. And it’s always based on the problem of evil— by far, the strongest argument for atheism.

So, after that happens, and the students are kind of surprised, I ask, “Why did that happen?” And then the real argument begins. The atheists, who were pretending to be theists, said, “Well, you had us argue for Santa Claus; it was a ridiculous position that you gave us.” The theists, who are pretending to be atheists, said, “No, we see both sides; you don’t. We see your best arguments; you saw our weakest ones,” and then they argue about that.

Let me give you the strongest argument for atheism that I know, based on the problem of suffering. Emotionally, it’s something like Ivan Karamazov, but intellectually— since being almost a New Yorker, I am impatient, and I like philosophers who can say much in few words— I love Thomas Aquinas, who in a single paragraph can write as much as modern theologians would take a lifetime to write.

Here is his incredibly succinct formulation of the problem of evil: “If one or two contraries is infinite, the other is completely destroyed, but God means infinite goodness. Therefore, if God existed, there would be no evil discoverable anywhere, but there is evil. Therefore, God does not exist.” It’s a very powerful argument. How do you answer it?

Atheists and agnostics also want an answer to suffering, although God is not in their equation. So, the question of suffering is universal, but it’s worse for a theist.

I will try to give you six answers, none of which is original. Three of them come from natural reason— philosophical reasoning without any reliance on religion or divine revelation— and three of them do come from religion or divine revelation. The first answer, which is basically the answer of ancient Stoicism, is that we are finite creatures. We have desires that are not going to be satisfied; so, we have a choice of either adding to our inevitable frustration or not.

Here you are in the dentist’s chair and the Novocain hasn’t taken effect and the dentist says, “We’re doing root canal work; so, you have to tell me where the pain is. There’s no alternative.” What choice do you have? You have a choice between enduring the physical pain and rebelling against it. If you rebel against it, you add psychological pain and terror and fear and make the pain worse. So, why not be a Stoic and just accept it? Red Sox fans understand that. So, one possible explanation for suffering is “We’re animals; we are finite creatures.”

A second answer that comes from an older source, namely all the myths, just about all the myths of all the cultures of the world, is that something happened way back when before history. Things aren’t supposed to be like this. Once upon a time, Adam and Eve ate an apple. Once upon a time, Pandora opened a box. Once upon a time, the magic bird that was supposed to drop the magic berry of heavenly happiness into the mouth of primal man fell in love with himself and swallowed the berry.

There are various versions of the story, but it is astonishing how almost every culture has some myth of paradise lost. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s true, but it does mean that it’s in the collective unconscious, and to say that there’s no truth in it at all is to be a snob. This is my fundamental argument against atheism, by the way. If atheism is true, then the incredibly small minority of human beings— most of which are concentrated in our uprooted society— are the only ones who are wise, and everyone else is living their lives with a fundamental illusion at the center, exactly like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. He believes in this thirteen-foot-high, invisible rabbit, even though he’s in his forties. That’s a pretty grim view of humanity. It doesn’t prove anything, but at least it ought to give you a bit of pause.

This universal myth that our present situation is unnatural seems to correspond to our present psychological data, that is, we all have a lover’s quarrel with the world. We can’t obey the advice of our pop psychologists to accept ourselves as we are and to accept the world as it is. We just can’t do it, if we’re human. Animals can. There is a perfect ecological relationship between the animals’ instinctive desires and their environment. What they want they can get, but there is one thing we want that nobody in the world has ever gotten: complete happiness. It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair. Thus, a nihilistic existentialist like Nietzsche is nobler than a nice pop psychologist. He rises to this dignity of despair.

A third and very traditional answer to why we suffer comes from the Greeks and Red Sox fans: Suffering makes us wise. To quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The man who has not suffered, what could he possibly know, anyway?” Or to quote Aeschylus, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of the gods.” If wisdom is more important than pleasure, then it’s a good deal. If we’re so foolish that we wouldn’t voluntarily make that deal, then how wise of the gods— whoever they are— to force us to that deal. While you’re suffering, you don’t want to make the deal. After you’re finished, you’re glad.

Think of the hardest thing you ever did or the biggest pain you ever had. Are you glad now that you have gone through that? Oh, yes! To quote Nietzsche again, “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” But, of course, while you’re there, you don’t think that.

Suppose you throw God into the package. What’s God’s answer to the problem of suffering, when he finally appears and gives Job, the archetypal sufferer, his answer? Job asks all sorts of great questions, and God doesn’t answer a single one of them. He says basically— if I may summarize his great rhetoric in a few much less great words: “Hush, child, you couldn’t possibly understand. Who do you think you are, anyway? I’m the Author; you’re the character.”

After the first shock, we realize that makes immense sense. If, in fact, we are characters in a story written by a transcendent Author, then for us to understand each syllable of this mysterious play would refute the hypothesis that there is a transcendent Author. He would no longer be transcendent. He would be us; he would be a projection of us. In other words, it’s utterly rational that life be irrational.

Or to use another argument, probably the most difficult verse in the whole Bible to believe, the most astonishing claim, the one that, like Socrates’s almost last words, seems ridiculously wrong, is Romans 8:28: “All things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Come on. You’ve got to be kidding.

Well, wait a minute; let’s deduce that from three premises— and almost anyone except an atheist will accept these three premises. Number one, God is omnipotent. If God is weak, there is no God. Number two, God is omniscient. He knows everything. If he’s stupid, there’s no God. Number three, God is all good. If he’s wicked and cruel, he’s not God. Well, if he’s omniscient, he knows exactly what we need. If he’s omnipotent, he can supply it, and if he’s all good, he does.

Therefore, as a logical deduction from those three premises, we must need everything that we get. It certainly doesn’t seem that way. Once in a while, we see with Greek wisdom how suffering produces wisdom in us, and we can look back at our lives and say, “I’m glad I went through that.” But much of the time we can’t say that, which is exactly what we would expect of the hypothesis that there is such a God. Far from refuting the existence of God, suffering that seems irrational and cannot be explained fits that hypothesis.

It also fits the hypothesis of atheism. Thus, you are left free to choose. You are left to do something like Pascal’s wager,

(#ulink_4a5ee96d-b87c-58df-a0ab-b51d2f08113c) since the theoretical arguments are inconclusive. Or if you think the theoretical arguments are inconclusive, then we can use a practical argument: What can you gain, what can you lose? You can gain nothing by atheism. Maybe you’re right, but once you’re dead, you’re dead; there is no reward. What can you gain by theism? Well, maybe you’ll gain nothing, no life after death, no rewards, and no punishment. But if it’s true, you gain everything and lose nothing. That’s not a very high and holy argument, but it’s an utterly rational one, as anyone knows who has ever played poker.

But let me offer three more specifically religious arguments that depend upon faith in the supernatural and in a divine revelation— one coming from faith, one from hope, and one from love.

One answer to why we suffer is basically God’s answer to Job: “Trust me.” It’s an invitation to trust— what parents give to children: “You’re a child; you can’t understand, but you can love, you can trust. You don’t have to, but you can. Try it; you’ll like it.” That’s basically Jesus’s first version of the Gospel— the old Alka-Seltzer commercial: “Try it; you’ll like it. If not, there’s Alka-Seltzer.” Look at Jesus’s first words in John’s gospel: “Come and see.” What an open-ended invitation!

Secondly, there is hope, which is faith directed toward the future. Suppose the entire universe is a very small thing, a womb. When you were in the womb, you probably thought that was the whole universe; it was enormous. Is there life after birth? Maybe so, maybe not. You found out that there was. Well, maybe that’ll happen again when you die, in which case you couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of suffering here. This is only the womb. When you were a little fetus, you probably said, “Why do I have feet? Why am I kicking? There are no sidewalks.” But now, you know. Probably 99 percent of what we do here is preparation for the next life, which we can understand about as well as our cats and dogs can understand our life.

It’s possible to believe the astonishing claim of Saint Teresa of Avila, who suffered a lot and asked God about it and got some answers. She said, “The most horrible life on earth filled with the most atrocious sufferings will be seen from the viewpoint of heaven to be no more serious than one night in an inconvenient hotel.” If that’s not true, then heaven is not heaven.

Finally, the deepest answer of all— love— which is, on a human level, solidarity with the sufferers. If you really love somebody, what’s the fundamental thing you want? What’s the aim of love, true, complete, deep human love? Unity, intimacy, closeness. Philanthropy, which is a genuine form of love, but not the most intimate form, wants to aid and benefit the other person, including giving him or her more happiness and less unhappiness, less suffering. But if you’re more than a philanthropist, if you’re a lover, then if your beloved is suffering, you want to be with him or her in the suffering, because you want to be with him or her everywhere.

According to Christianity, God acted that way. When he came to earth to solve the problem of suffering, he didn’t give us a technique for getting out of it; he didn’t give us a philosophical or mystical explanation of it. He invited us to participate in it, because he participated in ours. I think the most moving divine answer to the problem of suffering is the shortest verse in the Bible. When Jesus’s close friend Lazarus died, he went to the tomb, and the words are “Jesus wept.” In the next verse, everybody says, “See how he loved him.” That shows us what God thinks of our suffering.

For some strange reason, we tend to think of God as an absentee landlord, cold and indifferent, with some philosophical or mystical answer to the problem of suffering, and from afar, he says that you must go through this, but according to the Old Testament, it’s not like that at all. God is intimately present in the worst sufferings.

Where was God in the Holocaust? He was in the gas chambers. He is in every little baby who suffers. He is in the victim; he identifies with the victimized and never the victimizer. That doesn’t solve the philosophical problem, but it certainly solves the emotional problem. I don’t see how it’s possible to love a God who doesn’t identify totally with human suffering, because that’s not a lover.

Suppose your car is stalled in the middle of the night in bad weather and you don’t know how to fix it and there’s no tow truck. What you would like, above all, is to have a cell phone with you to get a taxi or to get a tow truck. You can’t. Let’s say the only person you can reach is your brother-in-law, who lives nearby, and he comes and he doesn’t know how to fix cars either and he doesn’t have a cell phone or a tow truck. So, what does he do? He stays in the car with you all night, and then in the morning you’re freed.

Aren’t you much more grateful to him than even to a tow truck? So, even when God doesn’t immediately tow us out of our suffering, the fact that he’s with us in it is at least the most impressive and satisfying answer to the problem of suffering that I know. And therefore, God doesn’t give us a lot of words to answer the problem of suffering. According to Christianity, he gives us a single word, and his name is Jesus.

(#ulink_5ca62b69-d56a-5cc9-9583-57cc7ac4ec25) The event was held in an opulent room of the Metropolitan Club on Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street, built by the wealthy industrialist J. P. Morgan.

(#ulink_82a126e6-fb57-5a6d-8f1e-33f17415c30e) Simply put, Pascal’s wager states that if you believe God exists and he doesn’t, you have nothing to lose; however, if you do not believe God exists and he does, then you have everything to lose. So, why not believe?

Q & A (#ulink_acb13439-0280-5083-9063-a36abec7f4da)

Thank you so much, Dr. Kreeft. We’re now going to take some questions. We don’t have any time for monologues. So, please put the question in the form of a question. Ahem. Anybody willing to step up to the microphone?