“It is not joy and sorrow which are opposed to one another, but varieties within the one and the other. There are an infernal joy and pain, a healing joy and pain, a celestial joy and pain,” Simone Weil, “Gravity and Grace.”
There is a great poverty in the English language’s vocabulary of negative and positive emotion or affection. How often are we asked, “How are you?” and how little are we able to express ourselves? How often do we seem, by all appearances and objective metrics, to be doing “good,” but really we carry despair within our hearts without knowing why or how to express it?
It is curious and troubling that, of all aspects of life, the most difficult to express is that aspect at the very center of life: the “pursuit of happiness.” I do not doubt that a large part of this poverty of language is due to an innate ineffability of our inner experience, especially our most profound experiences of joy and sorrow. But I can’t help but wonder if there are cultural reasons why the English language is lacking in this area. I would not expect the language of a people who are largely confused and who widely disagree about what “happiness” even is to boast a rich variety of expression on the types and degrees of happiness.
The Catch-22 is that the very reason (I suspect) the language is impoverished — i.e., a cultural failure to grasp the spiritual depth of joy and the interior life — is the same reason such language is sorely needed to add nuance and clarity to our often lonely and malnourished interior lives. While less developed countries suffer materially yet abide with a rich spiritual joy, more developed countries prosper materially but suffer existentially or spiritually, which can be seen from the alarming rates of suicide, depression, social isolation, despair, doubt, etc. Something must be wrong with the way we are pursuing happiness in the modern West.
It seems that our outward suffering comes with different inward qualities. Sometimes, our suffering feels desolate, lonely and meaningless; other times, it feels rich, accompanied and redemptive. To capture this nuance, and to enrich our vocabulary of suffering and joy, I’d like to propose two distinctions — between sweet and sour, and between holy and empty.
Our suffering is sweet if our outward struggle seems inwardly meaningful or somehow positive to us. Our suffering is sour if our outward struggle seems inwardly meaningless or altogether negative to us. Our suffering is holy if we undergo it with faith, trust and prayer. Our suffering is empty if we undergo it without calling on God, without trusting in God or even cursing God. Applying these distinctions to joy along with suffering, we now have an enriched vocabulary with eight categories of emotion or affection. I have listed the eight categories below, each with a characteristic example.
Empty sour suffering: An agnostic investment banker, working a hundred hours a week, struggles with depression and meaninglessness.
Empty sweet suffering: A competitive bodybuilder, whose vanity is as puffed-up as his muscles, fights through one last rep.
Holy sour suffering — Jesus laments on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Holy sweet suffering — A Christian feels himself growing closer to Christ through his Lenten fasting.
Empty sour joy — The brother of a king kills for the throne and all its luster.
Empty sweet joy — A staunch atheist finds purpose in his charitable non-profit.
Holy sour joy — Not possible, since the only thing that can turn joy sour is evil or emptiness.
Holy sweet joy — A Christian couple marries!
With this enriched vocabulary, it seems to me that we should desire not to go from suffering to joy, but to go from emptiness to holiness and from sourness to sweetness. Without this enriched vocabulary, it seems self-evident that we should desire to avoid suffering and pursue joy. Then, embarking on this “pursuit of happiness,” we wrongly assume that the project of our lives is to minimize suffering and maximize joy. But, in truth, suffering and joy often go together, and what determines the quality of our inner affections is not so much whether we are in a state of suffering or joy, but whether such suffering or joy is sweet or sour, holy or empty. As Weil writes, “It is not joy and sorrow which are opposed to one another, but varieties within the one and the other.”
One whose goal is to pass from suffering to joy, without appreciating the variations therein and the union of suffering and joy, will always see suffering as a problem — something to be solved, escaped, eradicated. But one whose goal is to become holy and remain faithful to Christ no matter what comes and who hopes to find some sweetness in his trials will not see suffering as a parasite to be exterminated but a sad reality to be confronted, patiently undertaken and transformed — just as he himself is transformed by the suffering, transformed into the very person he wishes to become, Christ.
Richard Taylor is a senior from St. Louis living in Keenan Hall. He studies physics and also has an interest in theology. He encourages all readers to send reactions, reflections or refutations to rtaylo23@nd.edu.
