Paimana

Fifth of Muharram, 1448 AH

In the first of these essays I was worried about the agent, about al-Ḥusayn, and whether, foreknowing his death and being unable to will the wrong, he could be said to have chosen.[^1] I want now to turn away from the agent altogether and look at the suffering itself, and at a question I find, frankly, much harder, because in the first case I thought I had something like a solution, and here I am no longer sure that a solution is even the thing to want. The question is whether the suffering at Karbalāʾ can be justified. And by justified I mean it in the technical sense the theologians have given the word, the sense in which to justify an evil is to exhibit the greater good, or the morally sufficient reason, for the sake of which a good and omnipotent God permits it. The discipline that does this is called theodicy, after Leibniz, though the activity is much older. I want to look at a case I think theodicy cannot survive, and, what is a different and more interesting claim, a case in which the tradition itself seems to know that it cannot, and to have decided, very deliberately, to do something else instead.

Let me first say what the going theodicies are, because I want to test them against a particular thing, and one should have them in view. There are, roughly, three.[^2] The first is the free-will defense: the evils that human beings do to one another are the price of their being free, and a world with free creatures who sometimes choose atrocity is, on the whole, better than a world of puppets who never do. The second is what is called soul-making: suffering is the medium in which souls are deepened, virtues forged, characters brought to a maturity unavailable to the comfortable, so that a world with suffering in it is a world in which something can be made of us. The third is compensation: whatever the innocent suffer here is more than made up to them hereafter, in a coin so much greater than the suffering that, looking back from there, they would not wish it away.

I want to dwell on the third, because here the tradition I am speaking of is not a bystander. It is easy to think of theodicy as a Christian preoccupation, or a problem for the philosophers, but the Muslim theologians who are called the ʿAdliyya, the people of justice, and who include the Twelver Imāmiyya along with the Muʿtazila, built a theodicy as rigorous as any in the West, and built it precisely around the hardest case.[^3] They held that good and evil are real features of acts, knowable by reason and not merely by revelation; that God, being just, does no qabīḥ, nothing morally ugly; that to lay on someone a burden beyond his strength would itself be ugly and so is something God does not do. And they faced squarely the case that breaks the cheerful versions of every theodicy, the suffering of those who cannot deserve it, the suffering of children. Their answer was compensation, ʿiwaḍ: the child who suffers is owed, and is paid, a recompense that outweighs the suffering; and the suffering is permitted to stand because it serves, beyond the compensation, as an admonition to those who look on, an iʿtibār, and as a trial of the parents, an imtiḥān.[^4] I am giving this plainly, and the great systematizer of it, the Qāḍī ʿAbd al-Jabbār, gives it with enormous subtlety; he even concedes that the infliction looks, on its face, like a wrong, like ẓulm, and then argues that since God does no wrong it must, all appearances notwithstanding, be right, the ʿiwaḍ being what closes the gap.[^5] Hold onto that concession. It will turn out to be the most honest moment in the whole edifice.

Now to the case. And here I want to proceed the way I think one always should in these matters, by taking the single hardest particular and setting the theory beside it to see whether the theory survives the encounter. Argue about evil in general, in the abstract, and every theodicy looks plausible, because nothing is really before the mind.[^6] The particular is not al-Ḥusayn. For al-Ḥusayn, as I argued in the first essay, was an agent; he chose; and because he chose, the redemptive readings the tradition offers of his death have something to work on. One can say, and the tradition does say, that his blood gives life, that he laid himself down for the community of his grandfather, that the death was a kind of gift; and whatever one thinks of these, they are at least the right shape of thing to say about a man who willed his end. The particular I have in mind is the infant. On the tenth day, among the people killed at Karbalāʾ, was a child of some months, ʿAlī called al-Aṣghar, the youngest, who was killed, the reports say, by an arrow through the throat while he was held up, having been brought out because he was dying of thirst.[^7] I am going to ask the theodicies about him, and not about his grandfather, because he is the case that has no agency in it, and so no purchase for any story that turns on willing, on choosing, on a life laid down. He laid nothing down. He was an infant.

Take the three theodicies in turn. The free-will defense tells us that the arrow is the price of the archer’s freedom, that a world in which men can shoot infants is better, freedom and all, than a world in which they cannot. Set that beside the throat of the child and notice what has happened. The defense was introduced to get God off the hook, to locate the evil in the creature’s misused liberty rather than in the Creator; but here it has the effect of placing the worst thing imaginable, the murder of an infant from the house of the Prophet, at the dead center of what God has chosen to permit for the sake of a good, the good of the archer’s freedom, that the infant himself will never exercise and from which he derives, in the half-hour of his life that remains, precisely nothing. The freedom belongs to the man who kills him. The price is paid by the child. A theory that distributes the goods and the costs like that has not answered the difficulty; it has stated it.

Soul-making fares worse, and it fares worse in a way that I think is diagnostic. Whose soul is being made? Not the infant’s; he has no soul-making to do, no character to deepen, no virtue to acquire in the medium of an arrow; he is six months old. The theodicist must therefore say that the soul being made is someone else’s, the onlooker’s, the parent’s, the later mourner’s. And this is exactly the move the kalām makes when it adds, alongside the compensation, the iʿtibār and the imtiḥān: the child’s pain is useful as a lesson to those of insight and as a test of his mother and father. But to say this is to have said something that I think we know, with as much certainty as we know anything, to be intolerable. It is to make of the infant a means, an instrument for the edification of others, a teaching aid, a device for trying his parents’ patience with God. D. Z. Phillips, who spent years on these questions, said the decisive thing: theodicies of this kind presuppose a calculus, a balancing of goods against evils, that cannot register the one thing that matters here, which is the dignity of the sufferer, the fact that he is an end and not a station on the way to someone else’s improvement.[^8] To ask, as he put it, of what use are the screams of the innocent, is already to have entered a line of speculation one should not have entered at all.

That leaves compensation, ʿiwaḍ, which is the tradition’s own best answer and which is therefore the one I owe the most care. The claim is that the infant is paid, hereafter, in a coin so great that the arrow is, in the final accounting, outweighed. And I want to say why I think this fails, because it does not fail in the way the others fail. It is tender; it is moved by exactly the right concern, that the child not be wronged, that the books be balanced in his favor. It fails for a more interior reason, which Marilyn McCord Adams, I think, saw more clearly than anyone. Adams introduced into this debate the category of the horrendous, by which she meant the evils whose suffering or doing gives the one who suffers or does them reason to doubt whether his life could be, on the whole, a good to him at all, evils that do not merely weigh against the goods of a life but threaten to engulf them.[^9] And she made a distinction, which she took from Chisholm, between balancing off and defeat. Two opposing values balance off when they are simply added together and the one cancels some of the other, the way a debt is canceled by a payment. But a great evil is defeated, when it is defeated, only by being taken up into some larger organic whole in which it acquires a different meaning, the way the ugliness of a small patch of color is redeemed by the painting it turns out to belong to. Her contention, and I think it is correct, is that the horrendous can never be merely balanced off, that no quantity of compensation, however large, even an infinite quantity, can outweigh it, because outweighing is the wrong relation entirely; a sum of money, however vast, does not address a murder, and to offer it is to misunderstand what kind of thing a wrong is.[^10] ʿIwaḍ is compensation. Compensation is balancing off. And the arrow in the infant’s throat is the horrendous in its purest form, the case furthest from anything that balancing could touch. To say that the child is paid for it is to treat the unpayable as a debt, and the deepest objection to this is not that the sum is too small but that the arrow was never the kind of thing that has a price.

Notice, now, what follows, because here the argument turns, and turns against the whole enterprise rather than against this or that version of it. Suppose, per impossibile, that a theodicy succeeded. Suppose someone produced the morally sufficient reason, the greater good that genuinely justified the arrow, and we saw it, and were compelled. What would we then have? We would have a demonstration that the murder of the infant was, all things considered, acceptable; that it was, in the final view, all right; that a perfectly good being looked at the arrow approaching the child’s throat and permitted it because, on balance, it was for the best. And I want to say that to be in a position to find that acceptable is already to have lost something one should not be willing to lose, that the very success of the theodicy would convict it, that a reason which made the arrow all right would by that success show itself to be a monstrous reason. This is the heart of what is now called anti-theodicy, and it is older than the name. Kenneth Surin argued that the theodicies tacitly sanction the evils they explain, that they display, in the explaining, a moral blindness toward what they are explaining.[^11] But the sharpest statement comes from Dostoevsky, from the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, who says that even if the suffering of children should turn out to be necessary to some final harmony in which all is reconciled and all wounds are healed, then the harmony is bought at too high a price, and he, Ivan, with all respect, returns the ticket. He does not say that there is no God. He says that no eventual good, no eschatological balancing, however complete, is worth the tears of one tortured child, and that he wants no part of a reconciliation purchased at that cost.[^12] I have always thought Ivan was right, and that his being right is the thing the theodicies cannot absorb, because a successful theodicy is precisely the claim that the harmony is worth the tears, and that claim, made good, would be the worst thing of all.

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to mistake what I am saying for unbelief, and it is very nearly the opposite. The Jewish theologians after the Holocaust came, many of them, to the same place, by the same road, and they were, for the most part, trying to be honest inside the faith. Richard Rubenstein concluded that the God of the traditional theodicy, the God whose justice could be vindicated by exhibiting the good served by the catastrophe, simply could not be spoken of after Auschwitz, that the theodicies had become obscene in the face of the thing they would have to justify.[^13] Emil Fackenheim, who would not give up the faith, put what he took to be the residual commandment in a startling form: there is, he said, a six hundred and fourteenth commandment, that the Jew is forbidden to hand Hitler a posthumous victory, and part of what this forbade, for him, was the consolation of a theodicy, the false peace of an explanation that would let the murdered be filed away as the regrettable cost of some greater good.[^14] What both saw, and what I am claiming the Muslim tradition saw at Karbalāʾ long before, is that there are evils in the face of which the right thing is to refuse to explain, and that the refusal is not a failure of theology but a form of it, perhaps the highest form.

And here is the sharpening that the case of Karbalāʾ adds, which I do not think the Holocaust comparison quite reaches, and which is the reason I have been calling this the suffering of the elect. At Auschwitz the murdered were innocents, and the theodicy founders on their innocence. At Karbalāʾ the murdered are more than innocent; they are, in the tradition’s own understanding, the awliyāʾ, the friends of God, the very household whose flourishing ought, if any flourishing does, to be the visible sign of divine justice in the world. If the prospering of the wicked is a standing puzzle for the believer, the slaughter of the family of the Prophet, dishonored, denied water, the infant among them, is that puzzle raised to a pitch at which no theodicy can stand, because the sufferers are exactly the ones whose suffering most directly impugns the justice it would have to vindicate. The case is built, one might almost say, to defeat the justifying God. It is the limit toward which the problem of evil tends, the place where the suffering and the holiness of the sufferer are maximal together, and where, for that reason, every attempt to show that it was for the best becomes not merely unconvincing but indecent.

So what does the tradition do, having, as I am claiming, this case at its center and being unable to justify it? It does not justify it. It mourns it. The whole institution of the majlis, the gathering in which the killing is narrated again each year and wept over, is, if you look at it as theology rather than as custom, the tradition’s considered decision to meet this evil with lament rather than with explanation, to weep where it cannot vindicate. And I want to resist, very firmly, the reading on which this is a confession of defeat, the reading that says the tradition would have produced a theodicy if it could and, failing, fell back on tears. That gets the order of value exactly backward. The lament is the recognition, arrived at and held onto, that argument was the wrong instrument from the start, that some evils are not problems to be solved but wounds to be witnessed, and that to have met the arrow in the infant’s throat with a successful proof of its acceptability would have been the real failure, the deeper blindness. The weeping is itself the theology of Karbalāʾ, and a better one, I am inclined to think, than any theodicy could be, because it keeps faith with the one thing the theodicies have to deny, which is that the death of the child is not acceptable, was never acceptable, and is not made acceptable by anything, here or hereafter.

Let me come back, at the end, to ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s concession, the moment I asked you to hold onto. He admitted that the suffering looks like ẓulm, like a wrong, and then reasoned that since God does no wrong it must really be right. I want to suggest that the concession was the truth and the inference was the mistake, that the right response to the appearance of wrong was to stay with it, and that the tradition’s tears are exactly the staying. There is a kind of knowledge, I argued in the first essay, that one has by presence and cannot be argued out of; and the conviction that the arrow in the throat of the infant is a wrong, simply a wrong, not a wrong that turns out on inspection to be a right, is knowledge of that kind, the heaviest there is. The theodicies ask us to trade it for an inference. The majlis declines the trade. I think the majlis is right, and that on these nights, when the tradition gathers to weep rather than to explain, it sees something about the limits of philosophy that the philosophers, for the most part, have missed. I said at the start that I was not sure a solution was even the thing to want. I am now fairly sure it is not. What one wants, in the face of this, is to be allowed to grieve, and to be in the company of those who will not tell you that the child’s death was for the best.

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[^1]: This is the second in the series. The argument leans at one point on a distinction drawn in the first essay, between al-Ḥusayn as an agent who wills his death and the others at Karbalāʾ who simply suffer it, and a reader who has not seen the first will want to keep that distinction in mind.

[^2]: I am compressing brutally. The free-will defense in its careful modern form is Alvin Plantinga’s, in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974); the soul-making theodicy is John Hick’s, in Evil and the God of Love (1966), who traces it to Irenaeus; the compensation motif runs through much of the tradition and I take its sharpest form to be the Muʿtazilite one discussed below. Richard Swinburne, in Providence and the Problem of Evil (1998), combines several of these, and is the modern theodicist most often, and I think most fairly, charged with the moral tone-deafness the anti-theodicists object to.

[^3]: On the ʿAdliyya (the Muʿtazila, the Imāmiyya, the Zaydiyya) and their shared commitment to objective good and evil knowable by reason (al-ḥusn wa-l-qubḥ al-ʿaqliyyān) and to the impermissibility of God’s doing the qabīḥ, see the standard accounts of ʿadl in kalām. For the principle that to burden a soul beyond its capacity (taklīf mā lā yuṭāq) is itself qabīḥ and so excluded, see al-Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d. 460/1067), al-Iqtiṣād. al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044) is the great Imāmī inheritor of this justice-theology.

[^4]: That children suffer pain by God’s action, that they are compensated for it (ʿiwaḍ), and that the suffering serves besides as admonition to the discerning (iʿtibār) and as trial of the parents (imtiḥān), is the Muʿtazilite teaching; see the doxographies and Margaretha Heemskerk, Suffering in the Muʿtazilite Theology: ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s Teaching on Pain and Divine Justice (Brill, 2000), which is the indispensable study. I cite the doctrine not to single out the Muʿtazila for blame, since some version of it is forced on anyone who holds both that God is just and that the innocent suffer, but because it is the most rigorous form the compensation theodicy takes anywhere.

[^5]: ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 415/1025), Sharḥ al-Uṣūl al-Khamsa; on his concession that an infliction such as the slaughter of an animal appears to be ẓulm and his argument that it must nonetheless be good because God does only good, see Heemskerk, and Daniel Gimaret, Théorie de l’acte humain en théologie musulmane (Vrin, 1980). The concession is to my mind the live wire in the whole discussion.

[^6]: The method is the one I used in the first essay and elsewhere: a general theory is best tested against the single hardest particular, where one finds out whether it was ever about anything. Tested against evil in the abstract, where everything is bloodless, every theory survives. The procedure is the same whether the theory is about reference or about the justification of God.

[^7]: For ʿAlī al-Aṣghar (also given the name ʿAbd Allāh), the infant killed at Karbalāʾ, brought out in his thirst and struck in the throat, see the maqtal literature and al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, vol. xlv. As with the other Karbalāʾ traditions the chains vary and I am not resting the argument on the precise detail; the infant’s death is firmly fixed in the tradition, and it is the infant as infant, the sufferer with no agency, that the argument requires.

[^8]: D. Z. Phillips (1934–2006), The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God (2004), develops the charge that the theodicies rest on a consequentialist calculus, a balancing of goods against evils, that cannot accommodate the dignity of the sufferer or the first-personal meaning of his suffering, and so end by instrumentalizing the very persons they would console; the line about the screams of the innocent is his. Cf. the survey by Toby Betenson, “Anti-Theodicy,” Philosophy Compass 11 (2016).

[^9]: Marilyn McCord Adams (1943–2017), Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God (1999). Her definition: a horrendous evil is one “the participation in (the doing or suffering of) which gives one reason prima facie to doubt whether one’s life could (given their inclusion in it) be a great good to one on the whole.”

[^10]: Adams takes the distinction between balancing off and defeat from Roderick Chisholm, and argues that the standard theodicies, which operate by balancing, are simply “powerless in the face of horrendous evils,” which can be defeated, if at all, only within the individual’s own life and not by any addition of goods at the level of the world. I am borrowing her diagnosis while declining her cure; her own proposal, that horrors are defeated by an incommensurate intimacy with God hereafter, seems to me to slide back, against her own best insight, toward a balancing of the kind she showed could not work. That she concedes, in answering Phillips, a “dissociation” of theodicy from moral reality is itself telling.

[^11]: Kenneth Surin, “Theodicy?”, Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983), and Theology and the Problem of Evil (1986): the two charges are that theodicies tacitly sanction evil and that they exhibit moral blindness before unconditional evils. See also Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (1991), who observes that theodicy persists because it pictures a world we wish existed, one in which evil is manageable.

[^12]: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), the chapter “Rebellion.” Ivan does not deny God; he declines the harmony, returning the ticket on the ground that no final reconciliation can be worth the unexpiated tears of a single tortured child. I take this to be the most powerful anti-theodicy ever written, and it is not an argument so much as a refusal, which is, I will suggest, the appropriate form.

[^13]: Richard Rubenstein, After Auschwitz (1966), arguing that the God of history whose justice the classical theodicy vindicates cannot be affirmed after the camps.

[^14]: Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History (1970) and earlier essays, on the “614th commandment” not to grant Hitler posthumous victories; and To Mend the World (1982). Hans Jonas, in “The Concept of God after Auschwitz” (1987), draws a different but related conclusion, surrendering divine omnipotence rather than divine goodness. The three responses diverge, but each begins from the recognition that the catastrophe cannot be theodicized, which is the recognition I am attributing to the majlis.