Greetings, friends, from Omaha! I am back in the Midwest for the week (for my quarterly visit to the law firm I work for). On Sunday, I completed something I never imagined: at 5:45 AM, I completed something close to a max deadlift (505 lbs) and then ran the Austin Half Marathon at 7:00 AM (1:47). I didn’t quite hit my goal of 1:45, but it was still a six-minute PR, and, overall, the day was a success.
Heading into the half marathon, I asked a few friends who were also running what their mantra was going to be—what words or phrases were they going to draw strength from when the going got tough? One said presence and gratitude. Another said the growth that comes from discomfort. Mine? Pathei Mathos. From suffering comes understanding.
Why? Five years ago, I completed a half marathon with little preparation. 1.2-mile swim, 56-mile bike, 13.1-mile run. After the swim, a failed attempt to mount my bike caused the clip to tear through the tendon on the top of my left foot. Blood poured, and I couldn’t lift my foot, but we biked anyway. Then, the small chain on the bike broke, and I couldn’t downshift during intense uphill climbs. After the first half mile of the run, the cramps started, and the remainder of the run was fighting cramp to cramp. By the end of the race, my toes were curled under my feet.
It was seven hours of pure pain and torture. No music. No distractions. Just lonely suffering with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. Tears came multiple times. But I learned more about myself in those seven hours than in the many years before it. Something about the experience of suffering through something compresses time and accelerates insights that otherwise would have taken years into a relatively small window. Since then, I’ve come to understand the way of Pathei Mathos and how certain types of knowledge can only be acquired through bouts of intense suffering.
It is to that belief—that from suffering comes understanding—that we devote the rest of today’s essay.]
Suffering is something to be avoided and eliminated from our lives. That is the mantra of much of today’s society and the stated aim of many philosophies and religions throughout time. Take Buddhism, for example, which holds that ultimate enlightenment is a life free from suffering (as expressed in the ideal of the Buddha).1 Or Epicureanism, which measures the worth of things according to pleasure and pain.
The chief danger in these modes of thinking is that they tend to ignore the many goods that come from suffering. Suffering produces growth and provides new insights. And only the foolish, Nietzsche writes, would do away with suffering:
You want, if possible—and there is not a more foolish "if possible"—TO DO AWAY WITH SUFFERING; and we?—it really seems that WE would rather have it increased and made worse than it has ever been! Well-being, as you understand it—is certainly not a goal; it seems to us an END; a condition which at once renders man ludicrous and contemptible—and makes his destruction DESIRABLE! The discipline of suffering, of GREAT suffering—know ye not that it is only THIS discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul—has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?2
In many ways, the story of Christ gestures in this direction. Consider the Christian story, which sees Christ’s life as one long wind up to the point of greatest suffering—the cross. Per crucem ad lucem. Through the cross to the light.
Before the Christians, the Greeks expressed a similar belief. Pathei Mathos. From suffering comes understanding. Or, from suffering comes knowledge and wisdom. The Greek tragedian Aeschylus includes these infamous lines as part of the Hymn of Zeus in Agamemnon—which tells the story of Agamemnon returning home from the Trojan War.3 As the Chrous launches into a meditation about the ancient events of the Greek world, they sing of how Zeus gave the ultimate gift… the ability to gain insight and understanding from suffering:
Zeus puts us on the road
to mindfulness, Zeus decrees
we learn by suffering.
In the heart is no sleep; there drips instead
pain that remembers wounds. And to unwilling
minds circumspection comes.4
What exactly Aeschylus meant by these lines is a debate better suited for Greek scholars more skilled than myself. But the line which declares “we learn by suffering” seems precisely right. Of course, it’s not the only way we learn; but it is one of the ways. What’s more, it seems to me, is that there are certain types of knowledge and insight we can only access through suffering.
What follows, then, is this: if we are to follow the Greek maxim to “know thyself,” then suffering is not something to be avoided; it is essential. That’s not to say we must bathe in it for longer than is needed to make us clean; it’s just to say that it remains something to be encountered forthrightly… not eliminated.
The way I see it, at least two types of understanding come from suffering: (1) understanding of reality; and (2) understanding of self.
Understanding of Reality
The first type of clarity that suffering can bring comes in our understanding of reality. In this realm, suffering has much to teach us about how the world works. Pain and suffering force us to set aside our naivete, which we would never willingly give up if we felt terrific all the time. Whether mental or physical, pain pushes us to move, explore, and discover. It summons us to seek answers. In this way, we see how suffering is essential to wisdom—inducing a particular kind of reflectiveness and depth that doesn’t come until we are forced to dig deep by necessity.
This kind of reflection is at the heart of post-traumatic growth, where one is forced to make sense of the experience and fit it into their broader narrative of life. Negative events and their demand for an explanation often result in individuals deconstructing and reconstructing their worldview to account for these new experiences. This neurological rearrangement often leads to something approximating wisdom.
Through self-reflection, individuals reconstruct, analyze, and interpret real-life sequences of thought, emotion, and action for meaning. The life lessons and insights arrived at through self-reflection lead to an ever-deepening and more complex appreciation of life, which we might call wisdom.5
Wisdom, the quality of having experience, knowledge, and sound judgment about the way the world works, is what we gain from suffering. In the reflection induced by suffering (of either ourselves or others), we are forced to confront two facts of life: how fragile we are and how precious our time is. And from that reflection, new perspectives and insights are unlocked. New beauties are revealed. This is partially what is meant when Ecclesiastes says, “[i]t is better to enter a house of mourning than a house of feasting, since death is the end of every man, and the living should take this to heart.”6
Certain fundamental truths can only be contemplated and made clear in dark moments. Periods of intense suffering and sadness have a way of introducing us to the reality of the world in a way that we might never know if we were never forced to confront it. Grieving deeply orients us to the things of God in a way that celebration cannot. Tragedy and loss remind us that life is fleeting and encourage us to turn our eyes toward and place our faith in eternal things. Tragedy, then, introduces us to truth.
Understanding of Self
It’s not just knowledge of reality that suffering brings, but knowledge of self. Arguably, its greatest benefit is its ability to help you know your soul—what it’s made of and what its dream is.
When it comes to the nature of the soul and what it’s made of, suffering introduces us to our strengths in ways that a life free from it could not. To paraphrase Epictetus: The trials we face introduce us to our strengths. They cause us to marshal new resources previously unactivated; we tap new wells of strength when our existing reservoirs are empty. In periods of intense suffering, we learn we are stronger than anything that stands against us and that there is more to us than we previously thought. There is something higher inside us capable of responding to any given situation.
As that relationship is cultivated, it is indistinguishable from establishing a relationship with the divine ideal that lives inside you—through suffering, we come to see the soul’s origin and its inexhaustive strength face to face. Perhaps that’s why Jesus had to go through the cross to get back to Heaven. Per Crucem Ad Lucem is the saying. Through the Cross to the Light.
Suffering also shows us the desires of our soul—revealing what we’re made for and what we truly value. Before we’re made to suffer for something, we cannot really tell how valuable that thing is to us. A love that hasn’t been tested can’t be trusted. A pursuit that hasn’t endured a crucible of pain can’t be trusted as your purpose. Until you’ve suffered for something, you cannot know, really, how much it means to you. In this way, suffering can lead you to insights about the soul’s dream—about what would make all the suffering worth it.
If we pick the wrong path, suffering serves as a signal to question whether the path we’re on is worth it. And when we answer no (assuming the no does not come from a place of laziness and cowardice), then we know that it’s not our path. Because when we’re on the path, we’re willing to shoulder all the suffering that comes our way on the road—all the pain is worth it.
When we remember all this, we see suffering for what it is: the price of wisdom. Not that we should seek it out ceaselessly; just that to avoid it is to avoid the gifts it brings. The way we must go is the way we must go, detouring neither to suffer more nor less than is necessary for our purpose. And remembering when suffering comes: pathei mathos. From suffering comes understanding.
Two things to those who might object to this sentence: (1) though his path to enlightenment is full of temptation and suffering, the end of the Buddhist remains to transcend suffering, which identifies suffering as something to be eliminated in this life; and (2) I am not attacking all of Buddhism here; I am simply offering an observation on the type of person that philosophy might produce (not dissimilar to how Nietzsche critiqued Christianity because of the lives he saw Christians living).
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 225.
Before the Trojan War, Agamemnon offends the goddess Artemis by killing one of her sacred stags. Artemis retaliates by preventing the Greek troops from reaching Troy unless Agamemnon kills his eldest daughter, Iphigenia. In some versions, Iphigenia dies (and Clytemenstra, his wife, takes revenge… which is the plot of Aeschylus’s play). In others, Artemis rescues her. This story parallels the story of Abraham and Isaac in many ways—a child is brought by their father to be sacrificed to a divine entity for the sake of a promise or a nation. This child may or may not be aware of what is happening and may or may not submit to be sacrificed willingly. In some versions, this child is saved from the sacrifice at the last minute, and a different sacrifice is made instead.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, lines 176-181 (translated by Sarah Ruden).
Weststrate NM, Glück, J. Hard-earned wisdom: Exploratory processing of challenging life experience is positively associated with wisdom. Dev Psychol. 2017 Apr.
Ecclesiastes 7:2.
How do you know when you’re backing down for the right reasons, vs the wrong reasons?
I feel like it’s pretty easy to trick yourself into believing that the path you’re on isn’t the right one, when in fact you’re just being lazy or a coward.
I’ve certainly done this more than once in my life. How do you stay connected to your true motivations?