On Patience

The Fourfold Meaning of Suffering

The Great Famine, in the fourteenth century, killed about ten percent of Europe’s population. Later in that same century, the Black Death would see some towns lose up to half their population. The Ars Moriendi, a work on dying well, emerged from this unimaginable calamity: The Art of Dying. Within the Ars, five virtues implicitly counter five deathbed temptations. In this post, I want to examine one of these virtues: patience. To endure suffering without succumbing to sorrow, to experience pain and not despair, to be in discomfort and not lose hope—these find their remedy in the single virtue of patience.

One man who lived through both the Great Famine and the Black Death was Henry Suso (1295–1366), a German Dominican friar known as one of the Rhineland mystics. Writing after the Great Famine, Suso says that:

This knowledge is most useful and is to be preferred to all the arts, the knowledge, that is, of dying. For it is common to all men to know themselves to be mortal … Yet you will find very few indeed who seem to know how to die, for this is God’s greatest gift of all. For to know how to die is to have one’s heart prepared, and one’s soul always directed on high, so that whenever death may come, it will find the heart ready, and will unhesitatingly accept the soul, as if it were someone awaiting the coming of his dear friend.^⁠1

Going through great suffering is no guarantee that one knows how to suffer well. That makes the question critical: how do we have patience?

Patience requires some understanding of the mystery of suffering, some assurance that suffering is something other than the fundamental truth of our universe. I want to suggest that suffering has four senses, four meanings, that function analogously to the four senses of Scripture. This framework takes evil with full seriousness without surrendering to its meaninglessness.

What then is patience? Consider the person suffering: their discomfort can become their universe, the context in which they receive all other aspects of their life. Heidegger described this as a ‘mood’.^⁠2 Patience transforms the mood of suffering so that it is no longer dread or despair, but becomes informed by promise and joy. The fourfold meaning of suffering can help effect this transformation.

We come, then, to the literal meaning of suffering. Like that accompanying a broken arm, some suffering sounds the alarm and aids protection and healing. But much human misery is not like this: there is no remedy for its cause, and at worst it becomes soul-breaking. It is pain without redemptive purpose: literally meaningless. This meaninglessness is only redeemed by the typological sense of suffering.

Typology shows the correspondence of our suffering to Jesus’ own suffering. This requires care. Jesus’ suffering as bearing the world’s sin stamps his suffering as unique and unrepeatable. But, as a human experience, there is still continuity between our suffering and Christ’s suffering. The same power that sustained Christ and imbued his suffering with meaning can reach us in our own suffering and alienation. As John Paul II writes, “The weaknesses of all human sufferings are capable of being infused with the same power of God manifested in Christ’s Cross. In such a concept, to suffer means to become particularly susceptible, particularly open to the working of the salvific powers of God, offered to humanity in Christ.”^⁠3

Through grace—and not moral heroism—our suffering becomes openness to the salvific power of God: as Paul writes in Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” But what does this actually look like? The next two senses, the tropological and anagogical senses, are based on the redemption of suffering that happens in the typological and help us see this concretely.

This brings us to the tropological or moral sense, which is the sense related to the present dimension of growth through suffering. This sense answers the question of how the person’s character or virtue is now formed by their suffering. Take a job loss; it can humble pride, refashion someone’s identity so that it is no longer centred on what they do, and allow a reshuffling of someone’s priorities. Suffering leads to moral development.

Of course, something like job loss is a trivial example. Abuse, rape, famine, death of a loved one. That their trauma brought about moral development will incense many survivors. The experience was soul-breaking, rather than soul-making.

Here, however, it is critical to remember that the link is with typology—with Christ’s redemption of suffering—not the suffering considered literally. It is offensive to suggest a link between child abuse and character growth; however, the redemptive power of Christ’s suffering grants meaning as a gift of grace to even the most horrific suffering.

In the Augustinian tradition, sin is the privation of the good. Sin is no substance, but is merely an absence; it is no-thing but nothingness, a privation where there should have been good. For had it some reality of its own, then it would be created, and the power to create lives in God alone, making sin his creature. This does not mean that sin does not affect reality, but that it does so as absence, as failure—just as the privation of doughnut at the doughnut’s centre gives it its characteristic shape.

Sin’s true fruit, its victory, would be meaninglessness, pure destruction, for from nothing nothing comes (ex nihilo nihil fit). God will not let sin have the last word. He will defeat evil’s attempt at pure destruction, snatching meaning from the jaws of sin’s meaninglessness.

Not that this will be instantaneous. Processing and working through an experience of suffering allows you to see its tropological fruit. At the beginning, all that might be possible is lament, and perhaps a person can never move past lament. Meaning-making takes time.

It is important to note that, rather than the individualistic consumer of neo-liberalism, this meaning-making takes place in community. The community around the suffering person will seek to sustain them in patience and join them in lamentation. The virtue exercised by a community in supporting a suffering person is like a choir supporting a soloist.

Finally, there is the anagogical or future, eternal sense. This is a preparation for eternal life. Scripture normally speaks of this sense when considering suffering for faith—as Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:17, ”For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison.” But even suffering as an ”evildoer”, in the language of 1 Peter 4:15, can prepare you for eternal life by wearing away the impediments to loving God. It is scarcely conceivable that other forms of suffering would not have similar effects.

Denys Turner, commenting on Dante’s Purgatorio, writes of “the recovery of an original excellence, the place where the soul is returned in happiness to its true self and to that self’s true world.”^⁠4 The true self and the true self’s world. We become who we were born to be, in deepening communion with reality. The overriding emotion here is joy, and thus the anagogical sense is the fuel for patience, the transformation of the Heideggerian mood of despair by promise and joy.

The moral growth seen in the tropological sense and the growth in the love of Christ seen in the anagogical sense have a predictable effect: they form the person to reduce the suffering of others. To put this another way, the true fruit of understanding suffering is embracing the suffering that comes from a love which will suffer as it seeks to reduce the suffering in the world, just as in the Good Samaritan. A true understanding of suffering is missional.

Yet my main thesis here—that the bestowal of meaning rescues suffering from absurdity—has faced eloquent criticism from David Bentley Hart. Hart’s position is a meditation on God’s impassibility, evil as privation, a particular metaphysics of the will, and the warfare texts of the New Testament. His thesis is that, ”Evil … can in no way supply any imagined deficiency in God’s or creation’s goodness; it has no ‘contribution’ to make.”^⁠5 God has no need to use evil instrumentally in order to bring about his purposes for his creatures.

Hart draws on gratuitous evil and particularly on the suffering of children in making his case. To pick up one of his examples, as he summarises Ivan Karamazov’s argument from The Brothers Karamazov, he tells of a five-year-old who had her mouth filled with excrement and was locked in a freezing outhouse for soiling her bed. Ivan then ”invites Alyosha to imagine that child, in the bitter chill and darkness and stench of that place, striking her breast with her tiny fist, weeping her supplications to ’gentle Jesus’ begging God to release her from her misery, and then to say whether anything—the knowledge of good and evil, for instance—could possibly be worth the bleak brutal absurdity of that little girl’s torments.”^⁠6

Hart is clearly operating from a framework wherein the modality of evil only has two options: necessary and contingent. God has no need of suffering; suffering is therefore unnecessary; therefore it is purely contingent nothingness, and as contingent nothingness it has no part to play in a divine plan for creation. The theology of Julian of Norwich reveals that there is, however, a reality that lies between the necessary and the contingent: the narratively fitting. It is certainly intelligible that creation can be free and sinless and that therefore God has no ’need’ of sin. But then the believer must understand why the creation has the story of sin that it does.

Julian bites this bullet and says that sin is ’behovely,’ and ’behovely’, Turner argues, falls modally between necessity and contingency, having the sense of narrative necessity or what ’fits’ and ”what ’fits’ is … more of an aesthetic kind than a logical one.”^⁠7 In other words, ”The theological meaning of behovely means that sin is needed as part of the plot … contingently indeed, but all the same just so.”^⁠8 Julian is clear that this judgement can only be understood from the perspective of the end: ”Her position seems to be this: we know that God is almighty love. We know that God creates and sustains all things, including our free, sinful actions. And we know that God cannot sin. What we cannot do is occupy the standpoint from which we could see the consistency of these propositions.”^⁠9

This isn’t a trite surrender on Julian’s part, but is hard won. Julian commits herself not just to theological abstractions but also to the scriptures as the church interprets them. Nonetheless, Julian believes that, ”Alle shalle be wele, and alle shalle be wele, and alle maner of thinge shall be wel”, and she sees that part of the ability to say this is that sin shall be seen as behovely: or to put it another way, that every part of the world’s story has meaning.^⁠10 It fits the story of God’s love that he shows it by conquering sin and death and by refusing to allow a person’s suffering to be meaningless.

What, then, can we say about horrendous evil or soul-breaking suffering? Certainly, the suffering of the little girl in Hart’s example might be literally meaningless, with no justification such as the necessity of sin in light of human freedom. But this doesn’t prevent the redemption of such suffering through the typological link to Christ’s own suffering.

It is important to see that evil is not an instrument on this understanding. It is not the evil itself, but Christ’s suffering presence to us in our experience of evil—the typological link—that grants suffering its transformative power. On a literal level, evil remains meaningless, dysteleological. Evil is conquered, not domesticated. Hart is correct in saying that evil and suffering are God’s enemies, but he conquers those enemies by granting them meaning and overcoming the ex nihilo nihil fit of evil.

How, then, do we acquire patience — this knowledge of how to die well, which Suso called God’s greatest gift? We must understand all suffering as potentially meaningful, a divine act of victory over sin’s nothingness, rather than as an affirmation of the suffering’s inherent meaningfulness. The four senses provide a view that allows promise and joy to change the mood of our suffering, allowing patience to flourish.

The growing of patience is, however, a slow work, worked in community through the agony of lamentation. I do not pretend that a blog post will provide the needed succour for the journey. I only hope that it provides a small impetus towards the transformation of how you understand your own suffering.

Bibliography

Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Hart, David Bentley. The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

John Paul II. Salvifici Doloris. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1984.

Julian of Norwich. “A Revelation of Love.” In The Writings of Julian of Norwich, edited by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins. The Pennsylvania State University Press: Pennsylvania, 2006.

Suso, Henry. Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours. Edited by Thomas P. Halton. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1994.

Turner, Denys. Dante the Theologian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

———. Julian of Norwich, Theologian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

¹ Suso, Wisdom’s Watch upon the Hours, 2.2. (243 ).

² Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division 1, 174; Heidegger, Being and Time, 176 [137 ].

³ John Paul II, Salvifici Doloris, 23 . Italics original.

⁴ Turner, Dante the Theologian, 157–58 .

⁵ Hart, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami?, 2005, 73–74 .

⁶ ibid., 36 .

⁷ Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian, 2011, 43 .

⁸ ibid., 50 .

⁹ ibid., 34 .

¹⁰ Julian of Norwich, “A Revelation of Love,” 27:10–11.