“The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.” (George MacDonald)
“Life is pain.” (Gregory House, MD)
Gregory House should need no introduction. Cultural consciousness being what it is, however, he probably does. For those who don’t know, House is a brilliant diagnostician, an investigator of medical mysteries with the acumen of Sherlock Holmes, albeit one altogether lacking in social graces, a curmudgeon through and through. He is also addicted to painkillers, a destructive dependency developed from his use of Vicodin to treat the infarction in his right leg. The drama and melodrama of House, thanks almost entirely to Hugh Laurie’s acting genius, makes for great television, offering plenty in the way of both entertainment and edification.
House has its fair share of network television’s absurdities, banalities, and inconsistencies: I freely admit that. I also contend, strongly, that House nevertheless has lasting merit as drama on account of its extensive and weighty consideration of the problem of pain. In fact, the show is basically a profile in suffering—a profile with exaggerated features, certainly, but one that still captures something deeply true about the human condition. In this regard, House—at least as I see it (and him)—has less in common with its “serious” cable counterparts of the new millenium such as The West Wing or 24 (Lost is a topic for another time), and more in common with the literary creations of the one and only Graham Greene.
Greene, like House, revolves his stories around the problem of pain. House protests, “I do not have a pain management problem. I have a pain problem.” Greene’s The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair suffer similarly, but with an added twist. For Captain Scobie of Heart of the Matter and Sarah Miles of End of the Affair, not only is life pain, but it also includes faith—and faith, rather than bringing relief to life’s pain, serves only to multiply its causes and consequences.
(I’ll note here, before getting into the swing of things, that I’m less interested in the psychology of Greene himself than in the psychology of his characters; less in the possibility of him projecting his own insecurities and tensions onto his characters than in the merits and deficiencies of his characters’ positions, especially if we take those characters and their hopes, fears, and loves as seriously as we would if they were not the figments of Greene’s imagination but in fact our own friends or family.)
That there are grounds for considering the characters in this lens, I have no doubt. Greene was no hack; he achieved enormous popular success and critical acclaim alike for his novels. William Golding called him “the ultimate twentieth-century chronicler of consciousness and anxiety”; John Updike said that both Heart of the Matter and End of the Affair “have claims to greatness; they are as intense and penetrating and disturbing as an inquisitor’s gaze.” If Greene’s characters and their crises were simply the stuff of projection or repression, as the case might be, then I doubt their stories would have generated in readers the kind of resonance that they did and still do. On the contrary, characters like Captain Scobie and Sarah Miles seize our attention and refuse to let it wander. Their drama is engrossing. It’s also frustrating.
Whence this frustration? This question has been dogging me lately, specifically in relation to The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair. Something just doesn’t quite sit right in my mind after my most recent readings of the two novels. Philip Stratford, editor of The Portable Graham Greene and all-around Greene aficionado, seemed to identify this latent tension in a 1959 essay from The Kenyon Review, entitled: “One Meeting with Mauriac.” The essay is the fruit of a conversation between Stratford and the Nobel Prize-winning French novelist François Mauriac. About midway through the conversation, Stratford—who wrote his thesis comparing Mauriac’s novels to those of Greene—raises the topic of Greene’s work. Mauriac confesses that, although he is “very fond of Greene himself,” he doesn’t like much of his work. The reason? Greene “tries to make religion too difficult.”
It is difficult, I know that…but it is not that difficult. And then he seems to suggest that it is religion’s fault if it is difficult, that the religion is to blame.
With all due respect to the legendary Mauriac, I haven’t been able to subscribe fully to this critique. It isn’t clear to me that it is religion which Greene makes too difficult; rather, he tries to make life too difficult and religion, or faith, plays the role of intensifier. This might well be two ways of saying the same thing, but I do think there’s a worthwhile distinction at play here.
If we go back to House, it’s obvious that he finds life to be pain because of his terrible physical ailment and his bankruptcy of those things that make life meaningful or at least endurable in spite of that physical suffering. He not only rejects outright the love and affection of family and friendship, but also refuses blankly to entertain the credibility of belief in God, let alone in the possibility of friendship with him. Why? It would not take away his pain; at best, it would be a placebo and at worst an exercise in self-deception.
Similar tendencies and tensions are work in The Heart of the Matter: a conversation between Scobie and his wife bears witness “to the pain inevitable in any human relationship—pain suffered and pain inflicted. How foolish we were to be afraid of loneliness.” No balm seems to be effective in treating this pain, especially not belief. If anything, belief only increases the pain. “I’ve given up hope,” Scobie tells Helen, his mistress; “I’ve given up the future. I’ve damned myself.” Helen mocks him: “If there’s one thing I hate it’s your Catholicism.… It’s so bogus. If you really believed, you wouldn’t be here.”
“But I do believe and I am here.” He said it with bewilderment.…
Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, “You’ve told me that all before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in hell anymore than I do.”
He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, “You can’t get it out of that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe I’m damned for all eternity—unless a miracle happens.”
At the end of the scene, Scobie sums up the drama, his drama, with the remark: “I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.”
Scobie’s position is tragic, all the more so because it seems so self-inflicted. House’s position, if we can call it that, is both less tragic and more common. It reaches its zenith in the faux intellectualism of New Atheism; traces of it appear in Thomas Hobbes’s view of life as an experiment in impoverishment, with government as the sole force capable of reversing the natural order of “nasty, brutish, and short”; and even before Hitchens and Hobbes and all the rest, obviously, this sense of impoverishment has been with us. C. S. Lewis, writing amidst the horrendous turmoil of World War II, recaps this constant of the human condition in the introductory chapter of The Problem of Pain:
In the most complex of all the creatures, Man…is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.… [Mankind’s] history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering.
Never mind God and religion; look at the natural order: pain and death abound. Who dares to say he believes in God? This is a standard response to the problem of pain. But it is not the response of Scobie and Sarah Miles to that problem. For them, it is impossible to comprehend the pain and suffering of life without attributing it directly to the will of God. Pain is certainly something God allows to afflict his creatures; perhaps it is even something he actively casts upon them. Belief thus throws pain into the starkest relief, rendering it in the highest resolution we can withstand—or not. Each in their own way, Scobie and Sarah Miles evidence the truth of Lewis’s assertion that “Christianity is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain.” Indeed:
[Christianity] is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.
House, the very model of a modern nihilistic atheist, would likely offer as rejoinder to this passage that Lewis is giving too much credit to Christianity. Belief neither creates nor solves the problem of pain. It is instead an ignoble distraction from life’s struggle for meaning, with its proponents tying up heavy burdens upon the backs of those foolish enough to take heed of them.
Contrast this view with that of Captain Scobie, whose belief in God is what gives him his consciousness of life’s pain in the first place. Perhaps the unbeliever suffers, but he doesn’t suffer as sharply; he doesn’t have to face up to the fatal and ultimate consequences of life’s pains. “The trouble is,” Scobie thinks to himself, “we know the answers—we Catholics are damned by our knowledge.” The same goes for Sarah Miles in The End of the Affair, addressing God in her journal: “Pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain.… You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.”
So far, so good. But while Sarah Miles manages to stay the course, Scobie is wracked with worry about the trustworthiness of the “solution” to the problem of pain. If God creates, in our mind, the problem of pain, then why is he so slow to solve it, his movements towards resolution so opaque, his ways not in the very slightest like unto our ways? In a devastating passage towards the close of The Heart of the Matter, God meets Scobie’s desperate soliloquy with a frantic pleadings of his own:
You say you love me, and yet you’ll do this to me—rob me of you forever. I made you with love. I’ve wept your tears. I’ve saved you from more than you will ever know. I planted in you this longing for peace only so that one day I could satisfy your longing and watch your happiness. And now you push me away, you put me out of your reach. There are no capital letters to separate us when we talk together. I am not Thou but simply you, when you speak to me; I am humble as any other beggar. Can’t you trust me as you’d trust a faithful dog? I have been faithful to you for two thousand years. All you have to do now is ring a bell, go into a box, confess…the repentance is already there, straining at your heart. It’s not repentance you lack, just a few simple actions. Or if you must, continue rejecting me but without lies any more. Go to your house and say good-bye and live with your mistress. If you live you will come back to me sooner or later. One of them will suffer, but can’t you trust me to see that the suffering isn’t too great?
But Scobie can’t bring himself to square the promise of his belief with his life’s burdens:
The voice was silent in the cave and his own voice replied hopelessly: No, I don’t trust you. I love you, but I’ve never trusted you. If you made me, you made this feeling of responsibility that I’ve always carried about like a sack of bricks.…
Earlier in the novel, Scobie thinks with shame: “How desperately God must love.” In reality, it is Scobie who loves desperately, hurling himself headlong from the safety of hope and toward the disaster of despair, relentlessly driving bad bargains for the peace and happiness of others at the price of his own destruction—convinced by his conscience of the necessity of his taking matters into his own hands.
As God’s rejoinder to Scobie makes abundantly clear, the good Captain’s fatal flaw is a lack of trust. That lack of trust, in turn, generates the failure to recognize that suffering is in fact grounds, perhaps the most common grounds, upon which we can dare to say we believe in God. “Pain insists upon being attended to,” Lewis writes. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.” Scobie clearly hears the shout; he just can’t heed it. As a result, he still views suffering—or at least the capacity for it—as a mark against the intelligibility and value of living; to make a bad thing worse, God himself put that mark there, or at the very least he tolerates its existence. Illustrative of this view is the scene in which Scobie confides in his mistress about the death of his daughter and his own inability to grieve:
When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.
Perhaps I am alone in this, but when I look at my children and think to myself, “I can’t live without you,” I do not mean: “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” I don’t want them to be in pain or unhappy or in want, of course not; but I can accept that those fates will befall them all the same—that, after all, is life. When I say, “I can’t live without you,” I mean what I say, nothing more, nothing less. If they departed this life, then life as it was, life as I knew it, life with the sweetness and light that only children can bring—that life would depart with them. Some semblance of life would go, of course, without them here; but it would not be life as it was before.
Thanks to his “responsibility,” however, Scobie means differently than he says. Because he feels himself responsible for the fallout from life’s destructive tendencies, he is incapable of—for lack of a more eloquent phrase—letting go and letting God. “It had always been his responsibility to maintain happiness in those he loved.” He feels compelled to play the game out with the cards he was dealt, even if that means playing the ultimate trump card, the card which the house never expects you to lay down—the one, in fact, which it expressly forbids you to play: your soul. “If, instead, I should abandon you, punish me,” Scobie prays, “but let the others get some happiness.” Then, at his pivotal moment, he reflects: “O God, I offer my damnation up to you. Take it. Use it for them.”
Again, Sarah Miles has the advantage on Scobie on this score. For her, the response to pain is self-sacrifice—and this sacrifice is properly, not perversely, oriented:
I believe You are God. Teach me to love. I don’t my mind my pain. It’s their pain I can’t stand. Let my pain go on and on, but stop theirs. Dear God, if only You could come down from Your cross for a while and let me up there instead. If I could suffer like You, I could heal like You.
Sarah abandons herself on the altar of suffering, commending herself into the hands of the one who will conduct the sacrifice; Scobie, in contrast, heedlessly takes it upon himself to serve as both victim and priest. O truly unnecessary fault: “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.”
In saying that Graham Greene made religion “too difficult,” François Mauriac was of course affirming that religion is difficult. To pretend otherwise is the height of foolishness. No explanation, no argument, no rationalization can ever wholly dismiss the nagging, worrisome problem of pain. Yet to take up the burden of belief, to utter the words I believe in God, does in a very real way imply your participation in the assertion that there is an explanation for this vale of tears—even if we only catch a hint of it. Mauriac glosses this point beautifully in his reception speech for the Nobel Prize:
For a Christian, evil remains the most anguishing of mysteries. The man who amidst the crimes of history perseveres in his faith will stumble over the permanent scandal: the apparent uselessness of the Redemption. The well-reasoned explanations of the theologians regarding the presence of evil have never convinced me, reasonable as they may be, and precisely because they are reasonable. The answer that eludes us presupposes an order not of reason but of charity.… Nothing is impossible to the living love, not even drawing everything to itself; and that, too, is written.
The “apparent uselessness of the Redemption”: this is the block over which we all stumble—less spectacularly, of course, than did Scobie—but stumble nonetheless. For myself, it is a stumble precipitated by an inability (or an unwillingness) to see that the cross “correlates” with suffering; that the paschal mystery is not something imposed upon my life, but is instead something integral to its very existence. Suffering, especially in our loved ones, demands a response. And this demand is unavoidable. Scobie acts better than he knows in placing such a premium on responsibility, on actually using his capacity of responding to something. The error lies in casting myself as the first responder; I am not the not first responder, but I am a responder. “We love because God first loved us”; we respond because he has spoken to us—or better, because he shouted to us in pain.
To paraphrase the divine whisper in Scobie’s ear, the response is already there, straining at my heart. It’s not responsibility I lack, just a few simple actions. Pain can deaden the strains of responsibility; pain management can distract me from those simple actions. So can pleasure, for that matter. These are potential scenarios. The inevitable scenario is that pain will encroach upon my existence and a response will be demanded of me. Pain is part of the plan; wave after wave of it will wash over me as long as I live. “So long as you live,” God assures Scobie. “I have hope. There’s no human hopelessness like the hopelessness of God.” So long as I live, I will have the opportunity to respond, to act; to cease my trespassing, to forgive those who trespass against me; to pick up the phone, write the letter, say the prayer; to commit to a path for my life and then stick to it.
Perhaps not as the wave pulls me under, but surely as it recedes, I can glimpse a view of the horizon—the horizon which makes sense of my suffering and gives it a purpose and direction. I don’t want the pain; I wish I didn’t need the pain. Nevertheless, it is persistent. That, I suppose, should be cause for some comfort, however cold it might be. After all, no pain, no gain.
Credits: Umberto Boccioni, The Drinker (1914), via WikiArt; Hugh Laurie as the character of Gregory House, MD, courtesy of Pinterest; covers to the 1962 Penguin editions of Graham Greene’s The Heart of The Matter (1962) and The End of the Affair (1961), via AbeBooks.