A Brief Philosophy of Pain

Why do we feel pain? Why do we suffer? These questions form the heart of so many pagan and modern philosophies because they are the hardest to answer. The world would make so much more sense, it seems, if pain simply didn’t exist.

But what can be gained from understanding what pain is? Of what use is its study? What good is knowing about it when it seems as though its origin is simply mysterious? We will attempt to answer these questions within a Catholic framework below, but first we must define exactly what we’re talking about.

Pain and suffering are found outside of the body frequently, in the form of wounds, hardship and disease, which are all products of some sort of violence. These can be inflicted by other people or by the environment; more often than not, there’s really no one to blame. Our priorities, in either case, revolve around managing and responding to the pain when we encounter it.

There is a different, albeit related, form of pain, and that is found in our interior life. It is our reaction to the violence of the outside world. It constitutes pains that don’t have easy explanations. It often manifests as stress, which can give birth to any combination of evils that stem from the seven cardinal sins. And it is on this pain that we will focus our attention.

So we can recognize that there is a cause of pain, which is violence of some sort, and our response to that pain. Pain sits in the middle as the uncontrolled, unsolicited effect of violence, even as it forms the impetus that moves our will or engages our reason. Let this not be taken to mean that pain is the only motivator, since it quite obviously is not, but pain tends to be one of the foremost motivators because it’s so difficult—or impossible—to ignore.

We can try to dismiss pain as a simple fact of life, as though it is part of a reality that we do not fully understand. This is tied into theodicy and the problem of evil; why do we get sick? Why do we feel injury? Why do we suffer? Why do we die? In this sense, pain is one of the few aspects of reality that we are capable of defining before we can even owe recourse to reason; pain assaults our senses, blurs our logic, distracts our thoughts. It prompts action, be that action a physical response or a mental exercise. It can be a great teacher, and those who learn to embrace it can come to be extraordinarily focused men, but this takes a concerted effort at applying man’s higher functions in order to tame his lower ones. Submitting to pain, fleeing from it, avoiding it: these are the animalistic responses of a man enslaved by his flesh. If we are not vigilant, pain will not be something we can define, but something instead that comes to define us.

Our response to pain is worth investigating, but it does little to answer what it actually is. If we accept pain as merely a part of this mysterious reality that we can’t understand, then we surrender any attempt to properly know reality. A rejection of pain’s sensibility is a rejection of our first understanding of the world. Pain is a sensation that is with us at birth. It’s a sensation we can’t simply ignore. When we feel it, we know it. If we do not wish to know pain, this first and most immediate element of our conception of reality, then we are rejecting the first means by which we can know reality. If we attempt to say, definitively, that pain is a mysterious and incomprehensible reality, we’re saying the same thing about reality itself: it is unknowable. Notice, however, that this forms a gulf between what is experienced and what is known, and it cuts off our experiences from our understanding—a forbidden divorce that, it turns out, modernity relies upon.

But this isn’t sufficient, because there are things that we can come to know—such as the fact that pain hurts and that we can feel it. Since pain is real, then there is at least something about reality that can be known. We can try to circumvent this by suggesting that pain, in fact, isn’t real—an answer proposed by certain Eastern modes of thought, which permutated into various modern philosophies. But this leads to the denial of reality in toto; not only is the pain an illusion, suggesting such inevitably results in claiming that reality, too, is an illusion. The Hindus suggest that a divine, ultimate reality lurks behind this false but perceivable one, not unlike certain Gnostic sects a couple thousand years ago, but this just poses more questions than it answers. If it’s false, why do we perceive it? If pain is an illusion, how do we feel it? If we cannot trust anything about our senses, how can we trust our reason? There’s surely something to be said for hypnosis and behavioral conditioning, where we can imagine or even be fooled into believing ourselves to have experienced things that we haven’t, but can this be said to be a fault with our experiences or with our reason that tries to make sense of them? As no one is privy to another’s interior life, where pain is first recognized, it seems obvious what the answer to that question should be.

If pain is knowable, then it has a certain reality to it. It isn’t something that exists purely withing our interior lives, as we all know what pain is—not, perhaps, the specific experience, but at least the concept. In a certain sense, pain could be understood as something we participate in when the right conditions are met, just as a cello string participates in a certain tonality when bowed. The string does not invent that tone, but the bowing of it causes it to resound; nonetheless, the world was made such that a tone—and that tone, specifically—would resound when the bow caused it.

So here’s where it starts to get difficult. Even those of us that dismiss pain as an unknowable reality to life recognize that certain conditions cause pain to come about. That we can see this brings us no closer to understanding what it is or why we feel it, but analyzing those conditions within the context of creation’s nature will.

We know God exists, and that the surest evidence of His existence is, in fact, the world all around us. How we understand this world will affect what we believe about God, however, which in turn affects our faith and our interior dispositions. Using reason alone, we can deduce, as both Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas did, that God must be all-loving, all-good, and all-powerful. With this as a starting point, where then does pain fit into the equation? The easiest answer is that pain is a sort of trial we must undertake in order to better love God. This is a sort of spin on the solution to the problem of evil: God makes use of evil to bring about greater goods; so too must we make use of pain, as God does, in order for God to bring about greater things in ourselves.

And this is true, but it’s merely a pragmatic answer to what pain is, and it does not account for why pain, which is evil in itself, would exist at all. Evil, being a deficiency of good, is not something God actively wills so much as permits to occur, any more than we can actively build hollow structures. In that example, the structure is what we build, hollowness is just a deficiency or a result of it. We allow ‘hollowness’ for a particular reason, but we didn’t build it. It’s defined by absence.

To this, however, we have answers in revelation. God did not necessarily intend for creation to be plagued by evil, sin, death, and pain; man did. Adam’s act of disobedience introduced death into the world, introduced sin; the Fall resulted in a “turning inward”, as Bl. Emmerich mentions, of man and of those creatures man was tasked with surveying. This turning inward, this rebellion, introduced conflict into a world originally created to be distinct—but in union with—God Himself.

Put another way, pain exists at the boundary line between the corrupted fallen world and the perfection of the divine reality. When Adam Fell, his flesh became his master. His true master, God, still held absolute domain over creation, but it was not God that stayed at the forefront of Adam’s vision—that place became filled with himself. If creation is a symphony, we can think of the Fall as damaging and throwing out of tune all the instruments and slapping earplugs on all of their players.

It is against this tendency that Adam and all of his children must fight against in order to see the kingdom of God; in this respect, the disorder of the world and the disorder of the flesh are one in the same. Although we are all redeemed through Christ, this contortion of our nature remains. Christ’s redemption, however, means that the Sacraments, when received appropriately, provide for us the narrow way that bridges the gap between our fallen state and the kingdom of God. Received appropriately, the Sacraments can fix our broken instruments and allow us to better hear the music around us, so long as we keep our eyes on the conductor.

This can be taken to mean that pain is a direct result of the disparity between creation as it was intended and creation as it is now. Man feels pain because he exists presently in a state diametrically opposed to his intended operation. He is at war with himself, in conflict, because man’s life is a living contradiction. The more man suffers, the more aware he is being made of this contradiction. God asks us to suffer, to take up our Crosses and to follow Him, not because He cruelly delights in our misery. God is all loving and all merciful and the father to us all; no good parent enjoys seeing their child suffer. He does so because embracing that pain means challenging the contorted Fallen nature of reality and of ourselves. It means saying, unequivocally, “I want to reject the world and embrace the divine reality that is at odds with it.”

The saints speak of pain as purgation; when suffered well, pain purifies the soul and prepares it for Heavenly life after death. We understand that purgatory, a place of (presumably) fire, exists for such souls as those whose consequences of venial sin must be burned away before they continue through the Pearly Gates. That purgatory can and does exist even before death. This is what is meant to embrace your Cross and follow Christ. This is also what is meant by the continual reminders to live in the world but not of it.

The world is fallen and continues in its contradictory nature until God so wills its consummation; after that, the contradictions will be rectified and the souls ready for God will go to Him, while those who are not will receive the gift of damnation. Call it a punishment if you want, but Hell is a place chosen freely over Heaven by its denizens. God will honor our will when we decide to be with Him or away, and to be away from God is to be away from everything good and true. It is to live in a state that galvanizes the contradiction of our Fallen nature: existence without grace, being without love, continuation without hope, forever.

We cannot run from pain, nor can we allow it hinder our faith. It is, in fact, the opposite: pain should strengthen our faith. Pain should reveal in greater detail the magnitude of the Fall, and how far from God we presently are—but it is by our deficiencies that the ropes cast down from Heaven to rescue us feel instead like lashes striking us in condemnation. Embrace pain and you will recognize that it is salvific, that God is there with you, that we know this precisely because He suffered even before we did, and His suffering was so perfect that any measure of ours compares only by the barest fractions to His. And that He did this for us.