Eleonore Stump is my favorite analytic theologian / philosopher. I say this as someone not particularly drawn to “analytic” philosophy / theology. If the human mind and human language cannot capture God, then the effort to describe God in ever more discrete units of analysis is bound to fail — indeed, it’s bound to become idolatrous. But there are different kinds of analytic philosophy and different kinds of analytic theology — not all are bastard stepchildren of logical positivism. What I appreciate about Stump is her effort to bring together what she calls “Dominical” — logical and propositional (and for Stump, drawn from the Great Dominican Doctor, Thomistic) — and “Franciscan” — narrative and intuitive — approaches to theology.
In her book Wandering in Darkness: Narrative and the Problem of Suffering (Oxford: OUP 2012) Stump draws these threads together in a “Thomistic theodicy transformed into a defense” of God in light of suffering. (Wandering in Darkness, 452.) I offer here a few reflections on this project, not really a detailed review, because I only picked this book up when I realized I needed it to understand Stump’s more recent book on the atonement, which I’m still reading, and therefore (and also because it’s a big book!) I’ve read Wandering in Darkness only selectively. And, of course, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, it seems like a good time to reflect on the meaning of suffering.
I think the strength of Wandering in Darkness is Stump’s development of a Thomistic psychology of suffering. The human person, Stump says, is fundamentally fractured. We long for love, but we choose evil, which divides and disintegrates us. Human psychology is only healed, or integrated, as we surrender to love — that is, to God. Surrender to God is not “submission” in the sense of the human person giving up the capacity to make truly human choices. Rather, “surrender” is receiving love, which brings with it the freedom to make truly human choices.
Surrender doesn’t mean we have arrived. In fact, surrender remains compatible with any number of ways in which we continue to make bad choices because we are not yet fully integrated and healed. In our state of disintegration, Stump argues, suffering is often necessary to bring us to the place of surrender, the place at which we realize we have turned away from love, as well as to continue in our progress towards integration. Suffering not only helps us see our own faults, it also helps us exercise love towards others who are suffering.
These general principles, Stump suggests, are illustrated in various Biblical narratives in which great suffering is redeemed through greater blessing. Sampson loses his sight and his life, but completes one last great act of heroism against evil; Job loses everything but has it restored many times over; Mary loses her son Jesus but bears the world a savior.
I think there’s lots of merit in the Thomistic psychology Stump develops. It’s not only Thomistic — I’d say, and I’m sure Stump would agree, it’s Patristic and Biblical. Stump’s reading of it, however, seems inconsistent at points. She insists that Aquinas believed in libertarian free will — a subject of enormous debate in the secondary literature on Aquinas — and Stump’s own reading of Thomistic psychology seems more in line with some kind of compatibilism than with any modern take on libertarian freedom. Maybe this just reflects the fact that the “libertarian” and “compatibilist” categories of modern analytic philosophy are foreign to Thomas’ Aristotelian thought or to the Platonism of the earlier Church Fathers.
I’m also not so sure of the Biblical narratives Stump chooses. I’m not sure the Bible offers any one consistent narrative concerning the problem of suffering. Even that bit tacked on to the Book of Job feels inauthentic, maybe an ending added by someone who didn’t like the unresolved feeling in the original story. But, certainly, many Biblical narratives point toward the hope that God can bring about good things from suffering.
What I bump up against most directly, though, is Stump’s emphasis that she offers a “defense” rather than a “theodicy.” What’s the difference? In a defense, she says “there is no need for a defender . . . to argue that [the claim defended] is true. Because it is a defense and not a theodicy, it needs only to be internally consistent and not incompatible with uncontested empirical evidence.” (Wandering in Darkness, 452.) This relates to the idea of “defeaters” in epistemology, notably developed in the philosophy of religion by Alvin Plantinga — though Plantinga’s “Reformed Epistemology” will differ at important points from Stump’s Thomism.
On one hand, I get it: we’re only human, there’s very little we can establish with empirical evidence and logic alone, and we’re entitled or justified or warranted in believing certain things absent some kind of final proof as long as we have reasons and no defeaters. But there’s more than a smackerel of self-justification in this idea, and sometimes it leads to some “defenses” that seem morally reprehensible. I don’t think the Biblical narratives give us a picture of philosophers building a hedge of internally consistent monstrosities resting smugly content their defense of God — or when it does give us that kind of picture, it’s usually so Yahweh (think Job’s friends) or Jesus (think the Pharisees) can smack that smirk off their analytical faces.
Stump understands this, and to her credit notes several times that Thomistic psychology isn’t really an emotionally satisfying answer in many cases of real, personal human suffering. I think I’d say it’s not really a “defense,” it’s one pointer toward something deeper — that the suffering is not all there is, that the suffering leads to the transformation of the cross and the resurrection. Is it all really “necessary?” No, nothing is “necessary” but God’s self — everything else, all that is created and not God, is only contingent. So why did God do it this way? I’m not sure that’s something a human gets to know, or even defend.