Abstract
Colloquially, suffering and pain are usually and exclusively concerned with the human body. Pain and suffering are clearly objective facts, as well as lasting and memorable experiences. Are suffering and pain purely biological phenomena and neurological states, or can they be interpreted by culture, religion, philosophy, sociology, Christianity, etc.? To what extent can it, therefore, be said that the body is sufficiently cognitively, motorically, and sensibly equipped to accept or reject unpleasant situations. Except biological, neurological, and medical, i.e., physical, views about suffering and pain, the Christian solution is one of the essential elements of human life which can serve as a bridge between adaptive and cognitive management and control of the body and mind and learned (parents, culture, society) patterns of dealing with pain and suffering. Our article aims to show how Christianity, in describing suffering and pain as the physiological fact and subjective experience, can be gathered up into a meaningful whole and a powerful sense of (in)active God.
Highlights
Pain and suffering are complex and difficult questions, pondered by individuals and society at large
To what extent can it be categorically stated that in this world there is no more room for lived suffering, responsibility for living things and nature, for oneself, since it is somehow imposed that we cannot in any way justify suffering given the existence of pain in the evolutionary body? Insisting on the natural and evolutionary development of pain, implies a reform of our understanding of suffering
Other opinions, albeit theoretical, can be cited, such as that of trinitarian Christian theology, according to which the Father suffered with his Son on the cross (Moltmann 1993): “If God has really participated in a representative sample of human suffering, God Himself must somehow suffer under the shadow of divine silence”” (Bell 2019, p. 50)
Summary
Pain and suffering are complex and difficult questions, pondered by individuals and society at large. It has already been mentioned that in the opinion of both the public and the specialized (scientific), the body is the one that produces pain and suffering In this sense, the physical body was often neglected: “It is not, that modernist philosophy has shown any great interest in the organic substantial body as such, but rather, in the human as the abstract universal marker of the site of foundational voice, vision and vitality” In addition to the general, almost everyday understanding of suffering within modern philosophies of spirit, scientific psychology, and cognitive sciences, suffering is observed primarily phenomenologically and defined synonymously, and its meaning is of limited use For this purpose, the deictic examples are used from the I-perspective to describe the physical experience of pain: I am broken, my being is empty, something deep inside me torments me, I feel uncomfortable, I am in agony, I am afraid, I am lamentable. How do we know that man suffers and fish do not? Is it possible in principle to imagine a humanoid robot that perfectly mimics human actions without any sense of suffering? With the triumph of modern natural sciences and the associated empiricist-materialist-shaped worldview, these and similar issues become central
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