Suffering by Dorothee Sölle

First published:Leiden, 1973 (English translation, 1975)

Edition(s) used:Suffering, translated by Everett R. Kalin. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Meditation and contemplation; theology

Core issue(s): Despair; ethics; Jesus Christ; mysticism; social action; suffering

Overview

Dorothee Sölle draws on Simone Weil’s philosophy to explore the phenomenon of suffering as “affliction,” involving three distinct dimensions. First is physical pain, but this is the least, because once it is gone, it is as if it never occurred. Second is psychological pain, the sense of being poured out, empty, or numbed and imprisoned by pain. These two dimensions alone do not rise to the level of affliction, however, without the third pole, social degradation, in which the sufferer is abandoned or worse, ridiculed, blamed, and despised for one’s suffering state. According to Sölle, Christianity’s response too often has been a type of theological sadism.

God comes to a sufferer only with pedagogical intent. Brutality and salvation become brothers, suffering serves to teach obedience and there is a perfect alliance between repressive theism and repressive society.

Sölle traces three possible interpretations of the suffering in the story of Abraham and the (near) sacrifice of Issac: First, God takes delight in annihilation; second, religious devotion requires obedience up to the sacrifice of one’s life; or third, the story writer is attempting to overcome the idea that God may be pleased with human sacrifice.

Ironically, at the same time, Christians in society assiduously avoid suffering, and therefore people become increasingly insensitive and indifferent to the suffering of others.

People stand before suffering like those who are color-blind, incapable of perception and without any sensibility. The consequence of this suffering-free state of well-being is that people’s lives become frozen solid.

Even while Christianity has promoted a theological sadism, at the same time it has proclaimed an apathetic God, in other words, a God incapable of suffering. The worst form of apathy is found not at the personal but at the political level. Sölle connects the history of the Nazi period as a foretaste of the “inability to suffer” that only became clearer in the history of Vietnam.

Sölle furthers Weil’s exploration of the suffering of the oppressed working classes through meditation on the story of a fifty-five-year-old foundry worker in Dusseldorf. He suffers the physical pain of blisters, metal burns, polluted air, fatigue, and undue bodily stress. Psychological suffering includes the monotony of the work and hopelessness that conditions will ever improve. Lastly, workers fear talking openly with one another lest they lose their jobs. There is suffering that is unbearable and destructive, suffering that is mute and that excludes change and learning.

What may bring about transformation of such conditions? Sölle emphasizes the importance of searching for language of lament that is essential for stepping out of the stage of mute, numb pain. This is the language of the Psalms. At the same time, this move from passive endurance to a kind of suffering that may humanize us produces social conflict. In the Christian story we see this same dynamic in Gethsemane. Sölle’s intent is to “historicize” both the passion and resurrection, so that we understand that Jesus’ experience is one that may happen to anyone. In the midst of suffering, it is inevitable that we cry out with the theodicy question, “Why?” However, theodicy is only an intermediary step; a “historicized” resurrection may be described as those historical moments and places where humans demonstrate the capacity to continue to love and affirm life even in the midst of suffering and uncertainty.

The mystical question regards how people can come to accept grief as joy. Sölle says it is not that our desire to diminish suffering decreases, but what increases is our concentration on a greater cause, to put God’s love into practice. In the mystical way, suffering and letting go are set against acting and having. Moreover, in the Christian understanding, suffering, mysticism, and revolution move close to one another, as Christians move past simple toleration of suffering to working on suffering so as to affirm the great love for life as a whole.

What matters is whether the suffering becomes our passion, in the deep double sense of that word. The act of suffering is then an exercise, an activity. We work with the suffering. We perceive, we express ourselves, we weep. To meditate on the cross means to say good-bye to the narcissistic hope of being free of sickness, deformity and death. Then all the energies wasted on such hopes could become free to answer the call for the battle against suffering.

Sölle explores this paradoxical freedom to work with suffering in the testimony of last letters of those condemned to death by the Nazis. What is so striking about these witnesses is their lack of bitterness or anger and the deep love expressed for those they are leaving behind. Facing death they know they may not avoid, they demonstrate concern for others, a deep knowledge of the connection between sorrow and joy, and a desire to impart a mission to those who remain. In Sölle’s view, Christians must see that wherever people are tormented and suffering, Jesus’ crucifixion and death continue. Moreover, love, though it does not intentionally seek confrontation, nevertheless finds itself on the cross in its unequivocal insistence on the liberation of people. Humans may avoid much bitterness of suffering, but at the cost of ceasing to love.

Christian Themes

Sölle reconfigures traditional understandings of the Christian life (imitatio christi) and attributes of God and Jesus Christ. While Christians have been admonished to interpret their suffering as a kind of vindication of the power of God through their very powerlessness or to adopt a universal willingness to suffer as central to their Christian identity, Sölle identifies such understandings as forms of masochism. To posit a kind of righteousness behind the reality of suffering, whether by way of a God who demands the sacrifice of Isaac or uses Job as an object lesson, or by way of a Christ who stoically suffers as the necessary sacrifice or scapegoat for sin, is to move in the direction of theological sadism.

In this respect Sölle foreshadows the feminist theologians and ethicists who in the 1980’s and beyond systematically began to analyze and critique traditional understandings of Christian atonement. For Sölle, the only salvation available to anyone in the context of suffering is to continue loving, or at least to desire to go on loving, even if only with the smallest part of oneself. Atonement thus is redefined. Only faith in God provides the necessary capacity to continue to affirm life in the dark night of the cross. Golgotha is the moment in which Jesus spiritually comes of age, as he must undertake the task of doing without his father. The story of Jesus’ Passion reveals a kind of Christianity that moves past religion understood as a defense mechanism against disappointment. God’s suffering with and in Jesus on the cross reveals the pain of God’s suffering wherever creation is wounded and intensifies the cry for human hands of healing and action.

The only choice we have is between the absurd cross of meaninglessness and the cross of Christ, the death we accept apathetically as a natural end and the death we suffer as a passion.

The strong tie Sölle develops in this work between Christian mysticism and social action is further developed in her final book, Mystik und Widerstand (1977; The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, 2001).

Sources for Further Study

Hall, John Douglas. God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg, 1986. A fully developed Lutheran Christian theological exploration of the question of suffering and its relation to Christian salvation and life. Appendix outlining alternative understandings, index.

Perkins, Judith. The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative Representation in the Early Christian Era. New York: Routledge, 1995. An interdisciplinary study of the rise of the understanding of the self as sufferer in the early Christian period. Bibliography, index.

Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. New York: Harper, 1973. “The Love of God and Affliction” contains Weil’s threefold description of affliction, and “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies” describes Weil’s focus on prayer and attention. Weil’s philosophy lays the foundation for Sölle’s description of suffering.

Williams, Rowan. Writing in the Dust: After September 11. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2002. Bishop of Canterbury’s narrative theological response to September 11. Readers will find his description of the Christian response to unfathomable suffering similar to Sölle’s.