27. Pain or sin: Which is worse?
27. PAIN OR SIN: WHICH IS WORSE?
Is pain and suffering the worst thing in the world?
A wise workman chooses a less evil in order to prevent a greater, as the surgeon cuts off a limb to save the whole body. But divine wisdom inflicts pain to prevent (moral) fault. Therefore fault is a greater evil than pain. There is a twofold reason for this. The first is that one becomes evil by the evil of fault, but not by the evil of pain, as Dionysius says: To be punished is not an evil, but it is an evil to be . . . worthy of punishment. . . . Because the fault itself consists in the disordered act of the will, and the pain consists in the privation of something used by the will, fault has more of evil in it than pain has. The second reason can be taken from the fact that God is the author of the evil of pain but not of the evil of fault (I,48,6).
“Evil” is ambiguous: it may mean the evil we suffer, physical or emotional, or the evil we do (sin). The essence of Heaven and our beatitude is moral goodness, not physical goodness: charity, not pleasure. Pleasure, and happiness, which is deeper, and joy, which is deeper still, are its byproducts. And the essence of Hell is the absence of moral goodness, not the absence of physical goodness, not the absence of pleasure and the presence of pain. Martyrs experience physical pains, but they are not in Hell. Tyrants, addicts, and playboys experience momentary physical and emotional pleasures, but they are not in Heaven.
We all instinctively know that spiritual evil (sin) is worse than physical or emotional evil (pain or depression), because when we truly and deeply love someone—e.g., our own children—we deem it even worse that they become voluntarily wicked than that they suffer involuntary pain. If your son was in the army and captured by the enemy and forced to choose between collaborating with the wicked enemy by torturing his fellow prisoners, or being tortured himself, his choosing the first evil would be even more horrible to you than the second. A live coward is not better than a dead hero.
Suffering is an evil, and we are obligated to relieve it; but deliberately chosen evil is far worse, and we are obligated to have no mercy on it. We must hate sin because we love sinners. The more you love the patient, the more you hate the disease, whether “the patient” is a body or a soul. Bodies are good and holy and precious, but souls even more so. Sin is soul-disease. Therefore sin is a worse evil than body-disease, pain or suffering.
God is not less moral, less heroic, or less idealistic than we are. He too would rather see us endure pain than inflict it. Even pagan Socrates knew that, and taught that “it is better to suffer evil than to do it” (Gorgias). When we agree with that, we are agreeing with God.
This has religious as well as ethical implications. Nothing more powerfully helps us to bear pain than the realization that God wills it. We can bear it out of trust and faith and love for our Heavenly Father. We can even rejoice in the opportunity for a little heroism, in the opportunity to exercise our faith and trust and love, to love Him for His own sake and not just for the sake of the pleasures and comforts He gives us. True love is content with nothing less than that.
Even if He only allows suffering rather than directly inflicting it, He allows it deliberately; and whatever He does deliberately He does out of love for us; and love always gives the beloved the good the beloved needs; and therefore God in His wisdom (which is bound to be mysterious to us because He sees so much more than we do) wills that we suffer because He sees that we need it for our own deepest, truest, most lasting good, or the good of someone else, or both. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel said, “The man who has not suffered—what can he possibly know, anyway?”
We are more sensitive to pain than to sin. We major in minors. We are upside down, we are standing on our heads. God is right side up. We need to start judging things God’s way.