Religions find so many uses for pain! It can be a payment for sin, preempting the even-worse pain of the afterlife. The medieval Christian theologian Thomas à Kempis advised that it is better “to suffer little things now that you may not have to suffer greater ones in eternity. If you can suffer only a little now, how will you be able to endure eternal torment?” In some religions, pain can be a penalty not only for one’s own sins but also for the sins of others. Self-inflicted pain in the Taoist tradition can not only atone for others, it can even rescue dead sinners who are already writhing in hell. In the Hindu and Buddhist karmic systems, pain can be a payment for transgressions from previous incarnations.
To embrace pain requires overcoming the most primal instincts. It requires privileging cultural beliefs (that pain may be desirable) over biological instincts (that it is always negative) and choosing a spiritual meaning that is normally overwhelmed by a corporeal one. Saints and martyrs are celebrated because they have achieved this unhuman or superhuman relationship to their own pain. Ironically, the bodies of saints are consecrated—and treasured in the form of relics—precisely because saints treat their bodies as something to discard.
In many traditions, martyrdom is the ultimate test of religious conviction, the most important opportunity for distinguishing the faithful from the apostates. In Hebrew, a term for martyrdom, Kiddush Hashem, means “sanctification of God’s name.” Martyrdom is the greatest act of Kiddush Hashem. For Christians, undergoing pain is the ultimate act of imitatio Christi. “Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, which are my way of reaching to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am to be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, so that I may become the pure bread of Christ,” wrote Saint Ignatius of Antioch in his second-century “Letter to the Romans.” His prayer was granted: the Romans fed him to the lions. (While praying for martyrdom was acceptable, seeking it out was not. Some would-be martyrs became frustrated by the Romans’ “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy toward Christians and turned themselves in for prosecution. But theological opinion determined that they were not virtuously withstanding martyrdom, but sinfully committing suicide.)
Yet how painful is willing pain? Do those who embrace suffering really suffer? Oddly, the ability to appear unaffected by torments seems central to the mythology of martyrs and saints—a mark of their special nature. While representations of sinners in hell show them writhing in torment, saints are usually pictured looking upward, their gaze sad and abstracted, such as Saint Sebastian, for whom being shot full of arrows seems only to have induced a deep reverie. “We pray you torment us further for we suffer not,” the brother physicians Cosmas and Damian legendarily implored their Roman torturers, who stoned them, drew them on a rack, and finally resorted to beheading them.
John Foxe’s beloved 1563 Book of Martyrs relates with adulation how, when Bishop John Hooper was condemned to be burned alive, he praised God for the opportunity to demonstrate faith to his former flock. And demonstrate it he did—praying aloud to Jesus Christ as the flames consumed his body—in gruesome detail. He continued to pray “when he was black in the mouth, and his tongue so swollen that he could not speak, yet his lips went until they were shrunk to the gums.”
Yet, Foxe noted, he prayed “as one without pain.” Therein lies the paradox of martyrdom: its virtue lies in embracing pain, but that embrace seems to inure the martyr against the very pain that defines a martyr!
TRIAL BY ORDEAL
Personally, it was hard for me to take much inspiration from stories of the martyrs welcoming their pain, when my pain felt so unwelcome—forced upon me, I sometimes fancied, like the ancient practice of trial by ordeal that had fascinated me as a child.
In trial by ordeal, which flourished for thousands of years in cultures from ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and India to Europe, the accused underwent a ritual in which—through magic or divine aid—guilt or innocence was established. In one type of ordeal, judges forced the accused to walk through flames or over hot plowshares for a certain distance, or to plunge his hands in boiling water or—worse—lead or oil. Astonishingly, betraying pain or injury constituted proof of guilt. In short, in order to prove their innocence, the accused had to show that they were protected from pain as martyr mythology insisted.
Sometimes signs of tissue damage itself were considered damning; in other instances, victims were permitted to suffer tissue damage as long as they maintained the equanimity of a martyr. In a form of trial by fire, the burns were inspected after three days, and if the wound persisted, the accused’s guilt was sealed. In short, the belief in pain as poena was so deeply rooted that suffering pain in and of itself proved the sufferer deserving of poena.
Hindu law has specifically endorsed the fire ordeal. In the Manusmriti it is said, “When the blazing fire does not burn a man . . . he should be judged innocent.” In the Ordeal of the Bitter Water in the Jewish Torah, a woman suspected of adultery was forced to drink a concoction known as “bitter water” (which most scholars now believe was poisonous). If the drink caused her belly to swell—or, if, indeed, she perished—her guilt was established. In Europe, fire ordeals tended to be reserved for the upper class and water ordeals for commoners and witches. A famous eleventh-century English adultery case is typical. Queen Emma of Normandy was accused of committing adultery with the bishop of Winchester. When she walked absentmindedly over red-hot plowshares and asked when her trial would begin, she necessitated a finding in her favor.
In the early tenth century, King Athelstan of England codified the laws governing ordeals, decreeing that for one of the ordeals, the accused must pluck a stone from boiling water, submerging his or her hand up to the wrist or the elbow (depending on the severity of the accusation). The hands of the accused would then be bound and examined three days later. If the wounds were healing, the accused was deemed innocent, as God had healed them, but if the wounds were “foul,” the accused was condemned. Other types of ordeals involved games of chance such as jousting matches or drawing lots, with the idea that God would rig the games so that the innocent would win. A particularly nasty variety was the Babylonian river ordeal, in which guilt would be fatally assessed by the river deity after the accused was tossed into the rushing Euphrates.
In the thirteenth century, ordeals finally gave way to trial by jury (indeed, the jury system is thought to have been invented partly in response to the pressure of growing skepticism about the ordeal). Torture-provoked confession remained routine long after the demise of the ordeal, and some scholars argue that it was practiced in good faith, so to speak. From a modern perspective (recent events in American history notwithstanding), torture seems obviously flawed as a means of discerning guilt; indeed, the very fact of coercion seems to discredit the information it elicits. Yet according to a worldview that sanctified pain, torture was believed to enlighten not only the torturer but his victim as well. “The witch is executed in an exceptionally painful manner because her death is conceived, obscenely to be sure, as spiritual passage, initiatory rite, or saving violence, not merely a removal from society,” Ariel Glucklich writes in his extraordinary book Sacred Pain. Mercy for the witch would have been misdirected because it was the witchcraft, not the woman, that was being burned out or boiled away, in a terrible baptism of sorts. The woman was being redeemed as pain performed its fearful alchemy.
Pain Diary:
I Decide to Get a Diagnosis
“What are you doing at the moment?”
“I’m in pain.”
—Daudet
“Pain strengthens the religious person’s bond with God and other persons,” Ariel Glucklich writes in Sacred Pain. “Of course, since not all pain is voluntary or self-inflicted,” he adds helpfully, “one mystery of the religious life is how unwanted suffering can become transformed into sacred pain.”
A mystery, to be sure. The ancient religious traditions of self-inflicted pain still linger in some corners of the contemporary world. They flourish in the Philippine celebrations of Easter, where ea
ch year volunteers are nailed to crosses before enthusiastic crowds, and in the Hindu festival of Thaipusam in India and Malaysia, when pilgrims regularly mortify their flesh—hanging weighted fishhooks from their chests or threading skewers through their cheeks and tongues—and say they feel no pain. I had seen gruesome photographs of the mutilated flesh and serene faces. But what did any of it have to do with me?
Crossing the street against the light one day in Providence, where I was visiting Kurt, I found myself caught on the traffic island. The day was unusually hot. It struck me how different that heat on my neck—just the other side of pleasant—was from the sensation in my neck, which burned in a different way, like the scald of dry ice. How odd it was that the world outside my body no longer seemed to come inside it! The day did not melt the dry ice and ease my pain into the ordinary crankiness of August on the East Coast.
With cars crisscrossing in both directions, the city shimmered as if it were not a familiar, but an allegorical landscape in a story, a movie, or a dream. What if I was not in pain, but in Pain: a large, busy city filled with other unfortunates, next door to Samara. If I were in Pain, what should I do?
Take up your cross.
I was surprised to find the phrase surface in my mind, because I’ve never really understood it. The idea made my brain feel fuzzy.
Take up your cross and follow Me.
Uhh . . . What cross was that? Most of the time I feared I was insufficiently committed to being happy. Was embracing crosses really a healthy goal? How could you distinguish a sacred cross from a penchant for masochism or simple misfortune? What if you picked the wrong cross?
Take up your cross and follow Me.
What if I tried to value my pain and see it as an opportunity for imitatio Christi? Could Pain—this pain that, for no reason, had come upon me—be my cross? Should I try picking it up?
Why? I felt diminished—degraded, even, by pain—not only physically but spiritually as well. I thought of a favorite Kafka short story, “In the Penal Colony,” that parodies the religious belief that physical pain can inscribe our bodies in sacred script.
In the story, a traveler visits a penal colony where an old Officer demonstrates his prized instrument of torture: a machine, called a Harrow, that literally uses needles to carve on the body of a prisoner a description of his crime, with pressure that increases over the course of twelve hours. The Officer explains that the nature of the prisoner’s crime is not told to him, but that six hours on the Harrow takes him to the point of enlightenment where he “deciphers it with his wounds” and there is a “transfigured expression from the tortured face”—a “glow of that justice, attained at long last and already fading!”
But the machine is rarely used anymore, the Officer laments: faith in its powers has been replaced by faith in modern jurisprudence. The spectacle of torture no longer draws happy crowds. Instead, the Officer performs his duty alone, executing the occasional prisoner. The torturer’s belief in the beneficent effect of torture on his victims proves wholly, shockingly sincere. The story at first appears to be a simple critique of torture, yet it turns out to be a critique of the broader idea of pain as passion, when, sparing the prisoner, the Officer unexpectedly throws himself on the machine.
“When pain transgresses the limits, it becomes medicine,” commends the nineteenth-century Sufi mystic Ghalib. Yet the Officer’s sacrifice only destroys the machine; its gears break, its needles pierce rather than inscribe his flesh, and their message is lost in blood. The Traveler “could discover no sign of the promised transfiguration” in the mutilated corpse, no moment in which the Officer had tasted, as Saint Teresa of Avila puts it, “the sweetness of this greatest pain.” Yet the blank stupidity of the Officer’s conviction appears unshaken: “His lips were pressed firmly together, his eyes were open and looked as they had when he was alive, his gaze was calm and convinced. The tip of a large iron needle had gone through his forehead.”
Pain inscribes the body in Kafka’s world, but the words turn out to be gibberish.
Take up your cross . . .
I didn’t want to be in Pain; I didn’t want to want it. Pain is not a cross; it’s a Harrow. There is nothing to decipher; the language of pain dissolves in suffering.
I scrapped the idea.
THE BODY IN PAIN
The longer I didn’t tell Kurt, the harder it was to begin.
I am afflicted by terrible pain, I would say.
Weird, he would reply. For how long?
A year and a half.
What? Why didn’t you say something?
I don’t know.
When did it start?
The day we were first together. Really. Precisely then.
What?
I would seem like I was hostile, hypochondriacal, or crazy.
Oddly, he himself suffered from neck pain, which should have made it easier, but it actually made it more difficult. He was a decade older. I was supposed to be the young, healthy one. He found sickly women distasteful; his mother had been sickly. I had a white lace nightgown he called “your took-sick nightgown” with the “consumptive look.” I argued that it was beautiful and expensive, but in the end, I threw it away and bought pajamas.
He would twist my neck at times to kiss me, or crush my shoulder in a hug, and although I’d tear up, I’d never explain. I’d lie awake at night reading his copy of Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, thinking how true is its thesis. Philosophers are always looking for ways to define the essential difference between what we can know about ourselves and what we can know about others—and pain, Scarry explains, is a paradigmatic example of that difference: “To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.”
I am in pain, I would think, looking over at Kurt. My body is in pain.
When one speaks about “one’s own physical pain” and “another person’s physical pain,” one might almost appear to be speaking about two wholly distinct orders of events. For the person whose pain it is, it is “effortlessly” grasped (that is, even with the most heroic effort it cannot not be grasped); while for the person outside the sufferer’s body, what is “effortless” is not grasping it . . . And, finally, if with the best effort of successful attention one successfully apprehends it, the aversiveness of the “it” one apprehends will only be a shadowy fraction of the actual “it.”
Ask me.
When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth . . . the pains occurring in other people’s bodies flicker before the mind, then disappear.
Don’t ask me.
Always, I felt a little lonely in the relationship with Kurt, haunted by the sense that he didn’t truly know me. Yet when I tried to think of what he didn’t know about me, the only thing I could think of was pain. The pain reflected the distance, but the pain was the distance, too. Pain was the reason I couldn’t sleep entwined in his arms the way he wanted me to. Pain was the reason I wasn’t really sleeping with him at all—or watching a Bette Davis movie with him, or making dinner with him. I was doing all those things with Pain. Did I not want him to know me?
I don’t recall the occasion on which I finally told Kurt about the pain, or what he said, but I know he didn’t respond badly.
I was wrong to have been so anxious, I told myself—to have imagined that he might see maggots of pain crawling down my neck into my rotten arm and not want to be with a rotting person. The fear that had kept me silent for so long, I realized—the fear that my pain would mean too much to him—had actually concealed another, more realistic, fear: the fear that it would mean too little.
PIONEER GIRL
I’m not seeing you on a canoe trip,” Kurt said when Cynthia and her husband invited us on a tr
ip to West Virginia.
“I love canoeing,” I retorted, although I never had before. The idea conjured a dim, unpleasant memory of a junior high school trip. But even as I said it, I could feel the tug of the pain in my right side and a self-doubt, the feeling that perhaps I had actually become the person Kurt thought I was—a person who was unable to canoe.
There was my present self, which I pictured with a gigantic head puffed up with pain, drooping from a pale, attenuated body, like a nineteenth-century neurasthenic patient. But I still had a vision of myself—of a plucky, resourceful, woodsy self, like an illustration from a Laura Ingalls Wilder book. The old self—who didn’t canoe, but did climb mountains, ride horses, and ski—was my best, most attractive self. This was the self that had enticed Kurt into swimming across the pond the day I first seduced him. But it was also the self that was lost that same day—the day I acquired pain.
The Pain Chronicles Page 8
