Transformative Suffering and The Cultivation of Virtue

The idea that certain experiences of suffering can be positively transformative has a central role in the practical and pastoral aspects of Christian theology. It is easy to identify different historical and doctrinal reasons why physical, mental, and spiritual suffering enjoy a central role in that tradition, but less easy to articulate and justify the provocative claim that suffering can be positively transformative. Indeed, some critics protest that the very idea is deeply offensive, on moral, theological, and psychological grounds, and those critics have included many Christian laypeople and theologians.¹ Given the prospects and problems of claims about transformative suffering, one ought to welcome Anastasia Scrutton’s recent development of a robust account of ‘potentially transformative’ theologies of depression (Scrutton 2011, 2015a). My aim here is to contribute to her account in two ways—first, by suggesting that the operative notion of transformation can be understood in terms of the cultivation and exercise of virtues, what I call edification, and second by suggesting that an edificationist interpretation offers resources that strengthen Scrutton’s account of potentially transformative (PT) theologies.²

The core claim of an edificationist conception of suffering is that certain experiences can afford distinctive opportunities for the cultivation and exercise of virtues. My account of an edificationist conception of illness draws upon the phenomenological model of illness developed by Havi Carel.³ Central to that model is the claim that experiences of illness involve the diminishment and disappearance of a person’s cognitive, physical, and social capacities—of the gradual loss of one’s mobility, memory, social confidence, and so on. Carel argues that there are two forms of response to capacity loss in illness: the first consists of familiar biomedical responses, such as surgery or drug regimens, and the second consists of ‘positive responses,’ including ‘adaptability’ and ‘creativity.’ Such positive responses involve the ill person adjusting their attitudes and activities in ways that ameliorate or minimize the negative impact of capacity loss on their life, such as the adaptation of their daily routine or creative identification of new ways to perform old tasks. Carel concludes that such positive responses to illness can allow an ill person to achieve a ‘modified but nonetheless rich texture of life’ (2007, 109). My suggestion is that Carel’s claims reflect a latent edificationism, because positive responses to illness are interpretable as the cultivation and exercise of virtues in a way that is positively morally transformative—or edifying.

There are three claims in common to edificationism and PT theologies. First, each emphasizes the intrinsically negative character of suffering, despite its positive edifying potential. Second, each emphasizes that suffering is only potentially edifying or transformative, such that the fact of one’s suffering is not, in itself, an inevitable source of positive transformation—a point reiterated by many ill persons.⁴ Third, both edificationism and PT theologies emphasize that the positive potential of suffering is contingent upon the sufferers’ response to their suffering. Scrutton’s account therefore shares with my account of edificationism the core claim that certain persons can respond to their experiences of illness in positively transformative ways. Furthermore, edificationism can offer two specific contributions to her account of PT theologies.

The first is that transformation can be understood in terms of the cultivation and exercise of virtues—of being edified—in a way that finds support from both Christian theology and the case studies of PT theology that Scrutton offers. Christian ethics has a strong virtue-ethical tradition that recognizes virtues, such as humility and tolerance, that edificationists often appeal to, in each case because those virtues are responses to the inherent frailty of the human condition. Augustine urged Christians to make “wise and appropriate use” of their illnesses in order to “exercise … humility” by appreciating the “frailty of … mortal flesh” (Larrimore 2001, 55–6). Scrutton also quotes remarks by Nouwen and Palmer that testify to the ways that their experiences of suffering led to the cultivation of virtues - of ‘greater trust’ and ‘stronger hope’—and to the ways that they had undergone...