Suffering and Mercy: Questions to Józef Tischner and John Paul II
Reflection on the problem of suffering and mercy played an important role both in the teaching of John Paul II and in the philosophy of Józef Tischner. The thought of both centered on the human being: John Paul II focused on man and his acts, Tischner on man in the context of the dialogical drama. Suffering and mercy are, next to love and hope, the most human of experiences. With time, their theoretical reflection was deepened by personal experience. After their last meeting at Wawel (on June 17, 1999) John Paul II—himself suffering—wrote a beautiful letter to Tischner on the suffering of Job:
The Vatican, July 3, 1999
Dear Father Józef,
We had the meeting at Wawel, but all too hastily. That whole journey through Poland was one great rush. But with Father Professor [Tischner] I need a longer conference. Could he come to Rome? It is hard to imagine that now. Already the last session took place without him. So I meet him, constantly, but without words. And it is a meeting with Job. Human suffering, sudden suffering, suffering which says “why” to God: it is the Book of Job. Job’s interlocutors gave wrong answers to his questions. The adequate answer was given only by Christ. For some time now, your existence, Father Józef, has also been inscribed between Job’s questions and Christ’s answer. All those who accompany you at this stage—and I try to be among them—know that they cannot give answers similar to those given by Job’s interlocutors. We try to maintain silence full of deep concern. And we ask Christ to speak. For only he has the words of eternal life. Please accept this from us, dear Father Józef. Accept this from me. I thank Christ for all the good that we experienced through you.With a blessing
With a heartfelt blessing
John Paul II
Before I present the views of Tischner and John Paul II on the subject of suffering and mercy, I would like first to sketch out the tension between the conceptions of suffering revealed in the opinions of these two giants of thought. Those two conceptions are difficult to reconcile.
The first defines suffering as good, deserving, and valuable in itself. Simone Weil, among others, was of that opinion. She believed that God became incarnate because he was jealous of man’s suffering. This conception assumes that God wants suffering, that he visits suffering on specific people, and even, according to some interpretations, causes it himself. God was incarnate as the God-man, the Son of God, to ultimately seal and confirm the value of suffering. Suffering is redemptive, and when it is accepted as redemptive it multiplies the infinite store of spiritual goods on which the Church can draw. All who suffer with Christ complete his agony, and Christ’s suffering itself is a compensatory sacrifice for our sins and an atonement for them.
The second conception of suffering declares that suffering is evil, that God does not want it, does not allow it, and does not cause it. God was incarnate and came to earth as the God-man to accompany man on his journey through the dark valley of suffering and death. Incarnation is thus an act of God’s solidarity with man. It does not ennoble suffering or lend it dignity, but it allows man to bear it more easily. Thus, man is saved not because of suffering but despite it. He is saved because of love and not because of suffering. If in the former conception God was the source of suffering (at least as he agreed to allow it, as in the case of Job), here, there is no answer to the question of where suffering comes from and why it exists, especially the suffering of the innocent.
In his statements, John Paul II does not unequivocally support either of these conceptions, although he does seem to emphasize the former more than the latter. Tischner seems to support the latter, but he also seems to hesitate. The language of the first of these conceptions is more appropriate for those who cannot live without the sense of meaning and stable grounding. The language of the latter is for those who can accept mystery.
Both conceptions confront us with a question about God. Who is this God that allows suffering? Is he god-the-merciless? Who is this God that needs the price of suffering to redeem humanity from evil and sin? Is he not a weak God if he needs to bargain with evil? Questions about suffering lead us to the very secret of God’s mercy.
Józef Tischner
Suffering
“Where does suffering come from?” asks Tischner. Our vision of the world is no longer the vision of Jan Tauler, for whom love was the principle of the world. For us, this image is darkened, for we are the children of the times of Auschwitz and Kołyma. According to Tischner, the problem of evil is an eternal metaphysical problem related to the condition of human existence. In an axiological interpretation of the myth of the Platonic Cave, he says:
What does this experience reveal to us? It reveals the fact that the world in which we live is not the world it could and should be. The primary axiological experience does not tell us that something should be that is not. Neither does it tell us that I should do something and abstain from doing something else. All of this appears to be secondary. Only this is primary: there is something that should not be. The visible world is an illusion of a world. Prometheus hangs nailed to the wall, but why, for what? We all live in the cave full of shadows. Why have we been thus chained? Why do the righteous suffer? Why did Socrates die the way he did? What is always primary is this: there is something that should not be.
Suffering is related to love. Out of these two elements, placed in relation to each other, Tischner puts a definite emphasis on love. He asks:
When does love improve itself? Is it when it can bear more and more sacrifices for itself? When it can bear a greater cross? When it can become Job’s love? When it can become a prayer on the manure of existence? This is a great misunderstanding. Already, Norwid warned us against it when he talked about the true progress of love. The true progress of love should not bring more of the cross; it should bring more wisdom. “The whole secret of human progress depends on the greatest, the only, the final weapon that is martyrdom, becoming unneeded on earth through the unconditional manifestation of goodness and revelation of truth.” Truth is reached by various routes. Let us concede that there are also truths to be reached through martyrdom. One of those truths is that when suffering, we suffer with Christ. We do not live for ourselves and we do not die for ourselves. Whether we live or die, we belong to God (St. Paul). On discovering this we can participate in the divine dignity of suffering. Nevertheless, it is not suffering that is important here. It is not suffering that carries. Quite conversely, suffering always destroys. What carries, lifts up, draws upwards, is love.
According to Tischner, we can illuminate the secret of suffering only in the context of God’s incarnation. The essence of the incarnation is the act of the Word taking up the human condition. The human condition involves border situations, such as guilt, the choice of one’s own God, and an encounter with one’s own death. The Word-become-flesh entered the very core of human border situations. There is no theoretical answer to the question about the specific sense of suffering. The only answer is the incarnation. From the beginning it has revealed the drama of human existence. The birth of Jesus was accompanied by murder of innocent children. Tischner recognizes the whole drama of this situation: “We may easily imagine the despairing mother who, having lost her child, blames not only Herod, but also . . . Christ: ‘Why have you been born? Why have you provoked the criminal?’”
It was not important for Tischner whether such accusations were actually made. Suffice it to say that they could have been made. What was Jesus’s awareness when he was told about the event?
We do not know what stages human guilt has undergone in Jesus’s soul. We only know guilt was not foreign to him. He was told at the river Jordan: you are the Lamb of God, you are a live bearer of human guilt. It will be said about him, repeatedly: “He bore the guilt of the whole world.” Jesus is revealed to us as the saint and the guilty one at the same time. From the border situation in which man needs to either accept or reject guilt, Jesus will emerge with the feeling of the deepest sanctity and the deepest guilt.
Tischner goes audaciously far in his interpretation: it is not mothers who lost their children that are guilty. They are not guilty of the fact that we live in a world in which the despair of mothers is possible. It is not God that dies for man first, but man who dies for God. God is born in a world of death. “His life . . . is the property of the innocently murdered and all others like them.” And elsewhere, he writes:
The incarnation of the Word, realized in such a world as we all inhabit. had to end in tragedy for many reasons. The logic is inexorable again. If God is love, if the Son is in the Father and the Father is in the Son, if human despair places God under indictment, the Son has to share till the end the fate of those who are despairing. The accusations of the despairing only then can loose their force when they hear the voice from the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
According to Tischner, the death of Christ is also a theodicy argument. Jesus defends his Father. The Father is not responsible for the suffering and death. The act of defending the Father is fulfilled in Jesus’s death. “Then he will carry the cross to show that God not only created the world but also died for the world.” This defense does not erase the secret. But it plants hope in man. It is the hope for love: “We all await for it. That it will come and free us from the responsibility of offering sacrifice.” It is the hope for love free of sacrifices, love unburdened by suffering and death.
Tischner presents a different conception of the incarnation and, consequently, of suffering, in his later article, “Mit samopoświęcającego się bóstwa” (The Myth of a Self-sacrificing Deity). The article is a polemic with a book by Helena Eilstein, Uwagi ateisty o micie ukrzyżowania (An Atheist’s Remarks About the Myth of the Crucifixion). Notwithstanding Tischner’s pointed remarks and polemic concerning myth and demythologization, one cannot entirely disagree with Eilstein’s concern related to the concept of expiatory sacrifice and atonement. Tischner himself admits that he had difficulty with the concept of “sastisfactionary atonement”:
When I heard about it years ago during lectures on dogmatics, I was torn. I thought that Scholastics “overdid it” subjecting God to the rules of arithmetic. How can finite man offend an infinite being? How can the offence perpetuated by a finite being acquire infinite character? How can love be subjected to calculations in which the weight of the offense and the weight of atonement is being calculated?
Despite these early doubts, Tischner decided to defend the Anselmian concept of atonement. It presents the essence of the incarnation in an entirely different light. To the question: Why God became human? (Cur Deus homo?), St. Anselm responds more or less in the following manner [as summarized by Tischner]:
Apart from love for man in the Holy Trinity, there is also the love of the Son for the Father. Does not the insulted Father—or the Father’s love insulted by sin—“deserve” some “atonement”? God loved and man spurned . . . Man’s evil—evil known as “sin”—struck into love. Should not love be compensated with some worthy atonement? How is this to be done? The Son of God finds a solution: here he will himself become human, so that what needs to happen may happen . . . The Son of Man takes upon himself the sins of the world; with his—both human and divine—sacrifice he gives the only compensation of its kind.
Tischner defended the idea of atonement. He tried to reinterpret it, understanding it as an act of love and a deification of man. “Who stands up for us, ‘lifts’ us upward—pulls us up to his level. When the Son of God ‘atones’ for man’s sin, the very act of atonement will be no less than the beginning of the deification of man.”
Yet, at this point, doubts arise. I believe that the problem lies not in the myth of self-sacrificing deity, but in the question whether the Christian understanding of sacrifice differs from the understanding of sacrifice in other religions. Can the idea of atonement thus conceived be reconciled with mercy? Does it not in the end lead back to an apotheosis of suffering? Tischner was aware of that, because he later wrote about Abraham’s suffering: “An Other-God demands a sacrifice (a demon is ruled out, though God who demands the sacrifice of a son reveals a highly ambiguous face).”
The story of Job is an important aspect of Tischner’s reflections on suffering. However, when we try to answer the question of where evil comes from, one thing seems sure—there exists no rational answer, especially when we are confronted with such evil that not so much threatens and lures, but stuns. Such experience seems to annul Tischner’s distinction between evil and adversity. True enough, the adversities that befell Job were not evil in Tischner’s understanding, for there was no perpetrator. Therefore, they were not “dialogical” like evil among men. Job, however, had a quarrel with God who allowed evil, even if he did not perpetrate it. From the perspective of theodicy, and thus in relation to God, adversities are also evil.
Tischner devoted four short texts to Job’s experience. Two are introductions to literary works: of the Book of Job in Czesław Miłosz’s translation (1982), and of Karol Wojtyła’s drama Job (1991). The arguments he makes in those two texts are conventional and, as far as I am concerned, entirely insufficient. In the former he claims: “The Book of Job is a book about the loyalty of man put to the test.” In the latter he argues that suffering, even if impenetrable, creates a situation in which man’s mature faith can grow.
The third of the texts is a fragment of a conversation with Ewelina Puczek. The Book of Job shows two possible alternatives concerning suffering. One is represented by what Job’s wife suggests to him: “Curse God and die.” The other is the position of Job himself, who bears everything in patience. I wish to point out two issues raised by Tischner’s argument. One emphasizes the customary attitude to suffering, still present in religious discourse: “Job fulminates with anger, but the comforter counsels that he should not complain; on the contrary, he should give thanks.” The second, closing statement shows how problematic is the situation in which man finds himself:
We cannot really admit—and we do not want to—that everything ends well. In fact, the situation is extraordinary from the ethical point of view . . . The question arises whether certain boundaries have not been crossed that should never be crossed. The entire Book of Job talks about the fact that for some time God withdrew his protection of Job and allowed Job to become a plaything in the hands of some undefined forces. Whose responsibility is it, then? God’s or his opponents? The question why Job became God’s victim remains unanswered. One thing is sure: Job’s terrible fate is a harbinger of the fate man can visit on the Son of God. One could say that, in a sense, God was jealous of man’s suffering and death.
The fourth text on Job from Spór o istnienie człowieka (Controversy Over the Existence of Man) is equally dramatic. Having experienced evil (or “calamity,” in Tischner’s language), Job is a monad without windows. He is an other to others, and isolated from them. He is an other also to God. He is separated from his “friends” by evil, by the suspicion that he has sinned. “True otherness has its source in evil, in participation in evil.” In this way Job becomes a closed monad. His friends try to console him. “But the more the consolations multiply, the deeper the otherness becomes.” That is why Tischner describes evil as “anti-gravity.” Evil pushes away everyone and everything:
But Job has a quarrel not only with his friends. Above all he is in conflict with that Other. “Job carries the Other within him. He carries the Other as his essential suffering. At the foundation of the body’s pain, under the layer woven out of wounds, at the source of calamities that befell him, lies Job, the one who is other, as other as human pain and suffering. . . . The Other is “other” and yet he is in him, in Job. The Other is his own suffering, his own curse. The Other invaded the monad and slammed its windows shut. The monad is not so much “without windows” as its “windows are shut.” The Other is pain which does not allow one to possess oneself. It is impossible to live without the Other, but it is also impossible to live with him.
In answer to the question “why evil?” we thus reach the limits of the phenomenal. “Why does the Other appear to him in the diversity of pain? Why does the Other prevent the one who is for-himself to be at peace with himself and to be himself? Why is the other against Job and forcing Job to be a being-against-itself? There are no answers to these questions,” says Tischner. Job thus lives on the boundary between retaliation and silence. On the one hand, retaliation is possible; his wife suggests: “Curse God and die.” On the other, there is silence: “The windows of the monad were slammed shut. Silence fell. Only once in a while the silence is filled with a complaint, with a sadness of the view, with a hopelessness of overgrown paths that once were traveled by someone who came to knock on the window.”
Mercy
For Tischner mercy is a “revelation of love.” Mercy is this kind of love through which the one who loves directs himself toward human “distress,” toward those who are deserving of mercy. Mercy is the pain of hope. Tischner juxtaposes God’s mercy with Robespierre’s mercy and Nietzsche’s will-to-power: “Robespierre’s mercy is expressed through unbounded terror. Sister Faustina’s mercy is expressed through forgiveness without bounds.” Robespierre’s position is the position of hatred in the name of mercy. “Who weeps over a hungry child, should not pass indifferently by the sight of those who are satiated.” Tischner also shows that mercy stands up against the will-to-power. It is not an expression of an embitterment. “The power that does not serve mercy, leads man into the wilderness.” Mercy is an expression of the powerlessness of love:
What is the essence of mercy? Have you ever struggled, dear Reader, with your own love? Have you felt the helplessness of powerless love? Such love was experienced by those who were admiring the greatness of Jerusalem doomed to destruction. So did Jair. So did Lazarus’s sisters. Now it is time for Christ. Looking at man lost in distress, God participates in powerless love.
Mercy is above all God’s attitude toward man. Mercy enacts the secret solidarity with the accused. God’s mercy is not expressed only in compassion, in the hope for reformation, but in bearing the blame together. With Jesus, “All solidarity based on compassion, or whatever else, is secondary in character; what is most important is participation in bearing the blame.” Such solidarity is also an attitude of man toward God. Merciful love carries with it the weight of repentance. “‘Repentance’ is the weight of ‘rubble’ which remains in the soul after the botched-up construction of so many Towers of Babel. It is the weight the Prodigal Son felt, to then return to the house of his father.” It is most striking that mercy according to Tischner is also the attitude of man toward God. Mercy is, finally, an attitude of man toward man. The attitude of mercy is possible only when crossing boundaries. It is not possible in the attitude of the possessor of the sacred.
At this point a further divergence happens between the roads of “the possessor of the sacred” and the One who “passed by doing good deeds” (the Good Samaritan). The possessor built a wall around his property. All of the world’s evil remained outside the wall. Within the walls there are only those who are “one’s own.” Nobody has contact with the heretics, nobody desecrates the Sabbath, nobody rebels against power, all rejoice in “the new freedom”—the freedom that operates according to the possessor’s wishes. Also, “true love” flourishes here: love of “one’s own.” In each of “one’s own,” the mark of the possessor is visible, of the one who “tamed” this piece of the world. But here, if necessary, women are stoned “who were found fornicating.” What is the attitude of the “possessor of the sacred” to the world beyond the walls? It is an attitude of ever-renewed suspicion. The evil of the outside world is the more evil, the more it hides behind the pretense of the good. That is why one needs to be suspicious. Cannot the wolf dress in sheep’s clothing? . . . Were he “with us,” he would have allowed the woman to be justly punished for her sins.
What is, then, the meaning of suffering? In Christianity, the only answer to that question is the incarnation and death of Christ as an expression of God’s mercy. Mercy changes the meaning of the concept of sacrifice. Sacrifice is no longer the price, buyout, a ransom. “My pain is a bridge to your pain. I can now perform the important act of sacrifice: I can offer God my pain for the salvation of the world.” This is not, however, a satisfactionary sacrifice. Suffering is not the price of salvation:
To make an offering is to no longer think about it: what has been offered does not concern me any more, but belongs to the person who received the gift. Pain is not important here. What is important is the love that performs the act of sacrifice. Man saves himself based not on the amount of the pain he has suffered, but based on love that brings happiness and helps to bear the pain.
John Paul II
Suffering
In his official statements, especially in the sermons for the sick, John Paul II praised suffering. He emphasized the value of suffering. He said: “With your suffering you complete the agony of Christ.” He called upon them to offer their suffering to the Lord as participation in his work of Salvation. According to John Paul II, spiritual suffering transforms itself into a salvific good. In the resurrection of Christ suffering acquires its dignity, because it casts off its uselessness. Suffering is an act of salvific love. No suffering is wasted. Pain is the priceless force of spiritual fertility. Illness exalts and dignifies. Suffering is a gift. Suffering linked with Christ’s suffering purifies the Church. Suffering accepted and born with resignation becomes the source of grace. Suffering can and should be the gift in the intention. In suffering God embraces us. Suffering contributes to the victory of good over evil. The pope spoke to the sick: “You for your part should act in such a way as to turn your sickbed into an altar where you offer yourself in all your devotion to God to his greater glory and for the salvation of the world.”
On the other hand, John Paul II talked about the mystery of being tried by God. It is difficult to understand suffering. Human suffering is such that no one can claim he has reached its limits. When walking in the pavilions of Piccola Casa, he said: “One experiences all too clearly its immense dimensions. And then the question is raised ‘why?’” The sick are not responsible for the evil of the world.
This twofold conception of suffering is visible also in the apostolic letter Salvifici doloris. The language of suffering stretches here from “the need of the heart” and “the imperative of faith.” The need of the heart demands that we fall silent in the face of suffering; the imperative of faith demands that we explain it. The letter begins with the fragment of Colossians 1:24: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” This, as the pope observes, reveals the salvific value and sense of suffering. Suffering is the price of redemption. On the other hand, however, suffering intimidates because it contains the greatness of a specific mystery, “Man, in his suffering, remains an intangible mystery.”
Suffering is inexpressible and not transferable. It demands, however, posing radical questions and seeking answers. John Paul II lists a number of different kinds of suffering: the death of children, childlessness, persecution, mockery of the suffering, loneliness, unfaithfulness, ingratitude, difficulty in understanding why the wicked prosper and the just suffer. Suffering is related to the question about evil. “We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he ought—in the normal order of things—to have a share in this good and does not have it.” Suffering is the experience of evil.
The pope recognizes the weight of the question about the sense of suffering, because suffering itself, especially the suffering of the innocent, obscures the image of God and his creation. The Book of Job is an expression of this question. Seeking the sense of suffering, John Paul II refers to traditional motifs. One of them is the educational aspect of suffering: suffering is a trial, a spiritual tempering. It serves conversion. The idea of satisfactionary suffering is quite different.
The pope also employs the language of the salvific economy: the Church draws from the infinite store of Redemption. Finally, he refers to the idea of Original Sin, because suffering is the result of Original Sin. Let us pose the question, however, whether that is clear for the mother who lost her child. It is clear if we identify sin with creation. The creation, as Simone Weil observed, paradoxically sinned because it wanted to be created. For creation is always below God. Suffering and death thus belong to the condition of creation. It is unclear when we should start looking for the link between suffering and sin—not only personal, but Original Sin. I cannot imagine going to the mother and telling her: “Your child died because of ‘the sin of the world,’ ‘from the sinful background,’ of ‘the social processes in human history.’”
The pope is, however, aware that no explanation is sufficient. “Love is also the richest source of the meaning of suffering, which always remains a mystery: we are conscious of the insufficiency and inadequacy of our explanations.” The papal language of suffering thus reveals an insurmountable tension between the notions of justice and love. On the one hand, the narrative of Job breaks the relation between suffering and punishment. In the eyes of Job’s friends, suffering “can have a meaning only as a punishment for sin, therefore only on the level of the justice of God who repays good with good and evil with evil.” The pope’s commentary on the position of Job’s friends moves against the idea of reparative justice: “The opinion expressed by Job’s friends manifests a conviction also found in the moral conscience of humanity: the objective moral order demands punishment for transgression, sin, and crime.” But Job has not sinned. His suffering is the suffering of the innocent. The Book of Job presages Christ’s suffering. Thus, on the one hand, the Pope ruptures the link between sin and suffering. “Christ suffers voluntarily and suffers innocently.”
The Pope, similarily to Tischner, writes, “The cross is the most profound condescension of God to man and to what man, especially in difficult and painful moments, looks on as his unhappy destiny. The cross is like a touch of eternal love upon the most painful wounds of man’s earthly existence . . . Redemption involves the revelation of mercy in its fullness.” On the other hand, however, the pope does not entirely abandon the language of satisfactionary justice and of the salvific economy. “In the passion and death of Christ—in the fact that the Father did not spare his own Son, but ‘for our sake made him sin’—absolute justice is expressed, for Christ undergoes the passion and cross because of the sins of humanity. This constitutes even a ‘superabundance’ of justice, for the sins of man are ‘compensated for’ by the sacrifice of the Man-God.” The “price of the Passion” and “the price of the death of Christ” appear again.
Mercy
When writing about the evil of the twentieth century, John Paul II, similar to Józef Tischner, argues for the need to preach mercy: “The twentieth century, despite undisputed achievements in many fields, was peculiarly marked by the ‘mystery of iniquity.’”
God is an inexhaustible source of mercy. When preaching these words, the pope reminds us that “mercy is the greatest of the attributes and perfections of God.” His perfection is particularly revealed in Christ’s love. Christ’s love is “an effective love, a love that addresses itself to man and embraces everything that makes up his humanity.” Mercy is revealed in two aspects: in the experience of guilt and in the experience of suffering. David is the representative of the former and Job the representative of the latter.
Mercy is an indispensable dimension of love; it is love’s second name and, “at the same time, the specific manner in which love is revealed and effected vis-à-vis the reality of the evil that is in the world.” The overabundance of mercy is the only possible answer to the enormity of evil in the world. John Paul II illustrates this with the parables of the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, and the Good Shepherd.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is particularly interesting in this context. Max Scheler, whose work John Paul II knew, wrote in his commentary on this parable that the forgiving father came out to meet his son without knowing the motive for the son’s return and without setting any conditions or asking for amends. “Again, in the parable of the Prodigal Son, it is not the fact of the son’s already complete repentance which is the reason and condition of his father’s forgiving him and receiving him with love; it is the astonishing realization of his father’s love which brings about the overwhelming repentance.” The echo of this commentary is audible in the following words as well: “It becomes more evident that love is transformed into mercy when it is necessary to go beyond the precise norm of justice—precise and often too narrow.” Mercy is joyful, generously bestowed upon the prodigal individual. Only mercy opens to truth and purifies.
For John Paul II, as for Józef Tischner, mercy is a threefold relation. God is its source. It is a relation of God to man. As such it should become the source of interpersonal relations. “God’s mercy finds its reflection in the mercy of people.” That is why the Pope calls for social relations to be based on mercy, not only on justice. He calls for witnessing mercy. He calls on us to imagine mercy. But mercy is also the relation of man to God. Also, God himself seems to deserve mercy and call for mercy.
The experience of mercy in John Paul II thus exceeds the remnants of the language of satisfactionary justice and the salvific economy, which are still present in his reflection about the sense of suffering; and even if it does not transcend them, it mitigates them. “True mercy is, so to speak, the most profound source of justice,” says the pope.
If, in his analysis of suffering, Józef Tischner differs from John Paul II, it is in that Tischner describes suffering in more dramatic language [see: his recently translated The Philosophy of Drama] and is open more often to the idea of mystery. Yet, they share the same language of mercy. Mercy does not answer the question of where the evil of suffering comes from, but it points to the only possible way this evil may be overcome.
EDITORIAL STATEMENT: This is an excerpt, without footnotes, from an unpublished translation of On the Evanescence of Life, translated by Zbigniew Kruczalak. The translator is currently looking for a publisher.