Suffering and Flourishing
Suffering and Flourishing

Summary/Abstract: Although we sometimes praise a person who suffers for not sinking under his suffering, we still suppose that the sufferer is to be ranked more among life’s losers than among life’s winners. And, in general, we are inclined to find perverse anything that values suffering itself. On the contrary, anything that undermines physical or mental thriving strikes us as lamentable. The current disability rights movement is an exception to this general attitude. It wants others to see that those with disabilities are not among life’s losers, or even among life’s heroic overcomers of the tragic, but are instead people to celebrate. From the Patristic period onward, the Christian tradition has held a roughly analogous position not as regards disability but rather as regards suffering in general. It has supposed that those who endure serious suffering are not the pitiable losers of life or even the heroic overcomers of tragedy but rather are those specially loved by God. In this paper, I want to look closely at the relevant Christian doctrines to see what can be said to explain this attitude towards suffering and to distinguish it from the neighboring perverse attitude that sees suffering as an intrinsic good.

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