Preface

REFLECTIONS ON SUFFERING can of course be found in texts that stand outside of Christian revelation. Sophocles in one of his late plays turns his attention to a story mentioned very briefly in the second book of the Iliad, a story in which Philoctetes, a great archer, suffers in isolation for many years while abandoned on an island because his agony caused by a wound that will not heal becomes unbearable to all around him. Sophocles finds marks of special closeness to the divine in the one who suffers: the wound that will not heal was incurred when Philoctetes inadvertently wandered into a sacred grove and was bitten by a water-viper, but Philoctetes also clings to a divine gift, the bow given to him by Heracles, and a prophecy finally reveals that the wounded one bearing this gift will be needed to fulfill the plan to which Zeus reluctantly acquiesced, that Troy should be destroyed. It would seem, in Sophocles' account, that Philoctetes clings to his pain with excessive bitterness and resentment, closing himself off to divine will through unrelenting anger, until Heracles appears as a god to persuade Philoctetes to return to Troy with the Achaean ambassadors who had come for him so that the divine plan can be accomplished. Philoctetes readily assents to this persuasion, seeing the manifestation of the god as the fulfillment of a longing that had held him in its grip throughout his long years of suffering.

Aeschylus some years before this play of Sophocles had incorporated into the chorus of his Agamemnon an insight explored by the entire trilogy of which the Agamemnon forms the first part: "and we suffer, suffer into truth." The movement from suffering into the illumination of truth struck the ancient tragedians profoundly.

Ancient tragedy and philosophy, however, even while discovering great truths in human suffering, do not prepare us completely for a distinctive moment of Christian revelation, a moment which we sometimes see emerging from the depth of suffering with a kind of dramatic surprise: the experience of joy when one feels touched by the love of God. (Is Shakespeare perhaps lightly alluding to the dramatic quality of joy near the conclusion of The First Part of King Henry the Fourth when Falstaff, stretched out on the stage and thought to be dead by Prince Hal and the audience, leaps to his feet in a mock resurrection?) We know such joy liturgically in the celebration of Easter, with the attendant color and music exhibiting the elevation of joy that accompanies our acknowledgement of the resurrection. The classical world could give us the courage and composure of Socrates, consoled and strengthened by his philosophic knowledge of the immortality of the soul as he prepared for death, but Christian joy exhibits a transforming qualitative difference that has been explored deeply by Christian mystics, composers, poets, and philosophers.

The distinctive qualities of Christian joy and happiness are explored in this issue by Paul Murray, O.P., in "The Task of Happiness: A Reflection on Human Suffering and Christian Joy," and his article demonstrates that suffering is one path to such joy. Father Murray turns to a variety of Christian witnesses to joy, including prisoners on death row facing the prospect of execution and showing the path to joy through suffering, but also including the path of laughter in the example of a number of medieval Dominican preachers. (We might recall here the laughter of Julian of Norwich that shocked onlookers, laughter provoked by her vision of the impotence of the devil in comparison to the power of God.)

Looking closely at Father Murray's article, we find a reflection on the basis of Christian happiness that serves well as a keynote to many of the articles in this issue: when our awareness of God's presence and love in our lives enables us in an act of recollection to find our lives centered in God's love for us and in our...