PAIN

PAIN . Most religious traditions seek to minimize suffering and explain its causes. At the same time, many religions around the world promote painful behavior in specific ritual contexts and produce influential discourse that praises the value of pain or glorifies those who either endure pain or willfully hurt themselves. Although such positive evaluation of pain in religious contexts is diminishing, it is still widely normative. In 1984, Pope John Paul II stated that "Christianity is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward fact of pain.… In a sense, it creates, rather than solves the problem of pain."

Definitions of Pain

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage." The vast majority of people know pain directly and vividly as a noxious feeling located somewhere in the body. Despite the fact that pain is notoriously difficult to express in a verbal way, most languages do provide tropes for speaking about the sensation. Over seventy words are used in the McGill Pain Questionnaire, which is administered to patients who complain of pain. These include physical, emotional, and evaluative terms, such as piercing, burning, drilling, punishing, nagging, and terrifying. Other languages are equally rich in pain terms. Biblical Hebrew (the books of Job and Jeremiah ) describes pain as tearing its victim, penetrating like arrows, and crushing like a storm. Similarly, Sanskrit and other Asian languages use terms that refer to tools or weapons, such as lances, darts, spears, or fire, in order to communicate the nature of the hurt.

The vocabulary of pain strongly suggests that pain and suffering are inseparable. In fact, the word pain is often used as a synonym for suffering : C. S. Lewis's famous book, The Problem of Pain (1940) is about emotional suffering. However, it is important to make a conceptual distinction between nociception (the perception of "physical" pain) and suffering. A back injury may be accompanied by suffering, for instance, due to isolation and loss of productivity leading to depression or anxiety. Other pains, however, may be experienced more ambiguously or even as desirable and joyful. A runner may report pleasant or desirable pain, and some cancer patients describe the severe discomfort of chemotherapy as healing. Similarly, most forms of suffering—the loss of a child to illness, for instance, or the fear of death—are not accompanied by pain.

Another distinction must be made: pain is distinct from either violence or death. Religious literature and rituals around the world describe violent executions, sacrifices, and the slaughter of nonbelievers and heretics as meaningful theological phenomena. A substantial body of scholarship is devoted to interpreting or analyzing violence and the sacred: Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred (1977) stands out in this respect. The phenomenon of pain occupies a distinct domain of religious discourse and practice. The swift beheading of a heretic does not communicate the same information on the role of the body, power, self, and eschatology as the gradually increased and slow torment of a martyr who is given the option of ending the torture by conversion. Moreover, the self-willed pain of pilgrims and ascetics is different from both. Similarly, violent displays accompanied by heroic insensitivity to pain—the Malaysian piercers during the Thaipusam festival, for instance—are only indirectly linked to the subject of pain. Here pain is regarded as a meaningful existential category, but only to be transcended and ignored. Ritual analgesia is not pain behavior, but it is based on a profound religious evaluation of pain.

Distribution and Contexts

The use of pain, or the praise of it, in religious contexts has been extremely widespread and diverse. Virtually every known tradition describes pain in spiritual terms, praises its effects, or prescribes it to adherents. This can be seen anywhere from ancient Near East religions, the three Western monotheistic traditions, and Greek and mystery cults to the major South and East Asian traditions and the religions of the Americas, Africa, and Australia. Pain figures either as an important feature of ritual performances or as the subject of extremely diverse and elaborate discourse. The performative use of pain includes pilgrimages, initiations (including shamans, secret societies, rites of passage, and puberty rites), mourning and funerary rituals, judicial ordeals, rites of possession and exorcism, specialized mystical disciplines, monastic guidelines, and modern mind-altering practices such as body-piercing and tat-tooing.

The most commonly practiced rituals in which pain figures prominently are pilgrimages, initiations, and rites of mourning. Pilgrims are often encouraged to walk barefoot on rocky or hot terrain, crawl on hands and knees or prostrate on the hard ground, sleep under difficult conditions, expose themselves to the heat or cold of the elements, and avoid refreshment and nourishment. Such discomforts are practiced in such places as Sabarai Malai in South India, Mount Kailash in Nepal, Lourdes in France, Guadalupe in Mexico, Karbala in Iraq, Jerusalem in Israel, Mecca in Saudi Arabia, and numerous lesser known centers of pilgrimage. Pilgrimage discomforts and pain are not incidental to the goals of the pilgrims' journey, or merely contingent on being on the road. They are central to the goal of pilgrimage. In Sabarai Malai, for example, a pilgrim was recorded as saying: "At one moment everything is pain. But at the next moment everything is love (anpu )…for the Lord" (Daniel, 1984, p. 269).

Initiatory rituals, especially rites of passage for boys and girls at puberty, have been extremely common and are still widely practiced—often in a painful manner. Methods of hurting, applied to both sexes, commonly center on the genitals, with various forms of incision, insertion of objects such as twigs, and scraping or stabbing. Other types of initiatory pain include scarification, piercing of various body parts (e.g., nose, ears, cheeks), knocking out of teeth, the practice of kneeling on hot coals, suspension from hooks, and whippings and beatings. Similar and additional tortures are used in initiations to religious and military societies, as well as academic and athletic fraternities; such tortures are also associated with shamanic practices in Asia and the Americas. For instance, the Sun Dance rituals of the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Crows, and other Native Americans are lengthy and elaborate series of painful rites culminating with the piercing and tearing of tissue in the chest. Although ritual participants articulate numerous reasons for participating in the Sun Dance, the pain discourse focuses on self-sacrifice for the sake of the community, love, and compassion (Jorgensen, 1972).

Mourning rituals in which self-mutilation is practiced range from the merely symbolic tearing of the button in contemporary Judaism (a remnant of painful biblical practices) to self-beatings and head slashing by Muslim followers of the murdered Imam Ḥusayn. Mourning rituals involving self-mutilation also extend through numerous tribal religions in which such practices as tearing out one's hair, slashing the thighs with a knife, cutting the body with various objects, or banging one's head against the ground are ritually enacted (Durkheim, 1965/1912).

Pain Discourse

The discursive contexts in which pain is described, prescribed, or praised include scriptural teachings, myths, and folk narratives; biographies and hagiographies of mystics, saints, or martyrs; religious poetry; sermons; and ethnographic evidence. Unlike ritual performance, pain discourse explicitly addresses the nature and function of self-inflicted or involuntary pain. The literary and oral sources invariably couch their discussions of pain in tropes or elaborate models. These included juridical, medical, military, athletic, magical, communal, and psychotropic ways of conceptualizing pain. The tropes reveal both implicitly and explicitly a dual evaluation of the effects of pain on the agent. Pain is either a destructive force—a punishment—that causes aversion, or it is a necessary evil or even blessing, like medicine. In either case, pain in religious literature is a meaningful aspect of human experience, which either strengthens something of value (e.g., identity with God, community), or destroys something of perhaps lesser value (e.g., ego, self). Despite the varying cultural contexts in which religious discourse takes place, pain models always reveal this dualistic evaluation.

The juridical model

Narratives and discourses about pain that describe it in terms taken from the world of jurisprudence are included in this model. The clearest is pain as punishment, an obvious feature considering the etymology of the word from the Greek poena, meaning "payment" or "penalty." But pain may also be described as a debt or as damages owed, and it may be related to laws of evidence when it is linked to methods of eliciting truth. This model accounts for a large percentage of the cases found in religious literature, and many pain patients still use it today.

Pain is often described as a punishment by some personal agency (e.g., God, Satan, demons) or by some impersonal mechanism, such as karma. The punishment may be perceived as just, as the confessional writings of sinners and penitents indicate, or it may be entirely unwarranted and tragic. Such is the case of Job, or the cry of Prometheus, who rightly calls Zeus a tyrant.

Juridical pain straddles the boundary between lex tallionis (the law of retaliation) and the law of debts in a variety of cultures, from Judaism and ancient Greece to Hindu versions of karma. The difference between pain as punishment and an exchange of debts involves the legal distinction between owing something to a private party and being accountable to society as a whole. The strongest Jewish instance of this distinction may be found in the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) liturgy with its notion of redemption as exchange (pidyon ) or a debt. This mechanism, the restoration of a balance through the perhaps magical or sacrificial mediation of pain, is also seen in the South Asian vrata —the vow that utilizes self-sacrifice to bring about desired results.

Juridical pain evokes the laws of evidence: Pain serves as the instrument for obtaining the truth from reluctant witnesses or the accused. This principle operates not just in cases of ordeals or religious inquisitions, as one might expect, but also in cases of initiatory ordeal and asceticism. This pain is a test. In the New Testament the agony that Jesus suffered in Gethsemane is characterized as a test, a type of ordeal or trial that reveals a hidden truth: "Because he himself was tested by what he suffered, he is able to help those who are being tested" (Heb. 2:12). Buddhist and Hindu texts (e.g., Warrior Zen: The Diamond-hard Wisdom of Suzuki Shosan, the Bhagavadgītā, and Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra ) urge the practitioner to treat pain and pleasure alike in order to unmask the truth about the self.

Pain as medicine

Even though modern medical authorities characterize pain as an aversive sensation, religious sources often describe it as medical, and in so doing, evaluate it as a beneficial experience. A dramatic example comes from Prudentius, a fourth-century Christian poet who attributes to the martyr Saint Romanus the following words: "You will shudder at the handiwork of the executioners, but are doctors' hands gentler, when Hippocrates' cruel butchery is going on? The living flesh is cut and fresh-drawn blood stains lancers when festering matter is being scraped away." The claim, made forcefully by Saint Basil (d. 379) and others, is not that pain is pleasant, but that it benefits the soul. One need not seek it like a martyr, but if afflicted naturally, the pain ought to be taken as a spiritual sign—not just a reason for running to the doctor.

Medicine is both preventive and curative. It either cures diseases that have already been contracted (sin), or prevents ills to follow (punishment). In either case a familiar feature of classical medicine—and attendant aspects of this way of conceptualizing pain—is that the remedy is as bitter as the disease. In its Christian version this model may owe a great deal to the classic dictum that "medicine is the philosophy of the body, and philosophy is the medicine of the soul." This ideology can also be seen in Islamic metaphors for religious pain. The Ṣūfī poet Rūmī (1207–1273 ce) referred to "love" (of God) as pain without cure. The Sea of Precious Virtues (twelfth century) warns the man who seeks worldly gain that just as he is willing to suffer with a physician for physical health, so he must heed the health of the soul to avoid hell. And Shāh˓Abdul Laṭīf, an eighteenth-century Indian Ṣūfī, wrote that the true lover of God does not seek out the medicine of the physician. The South Asian Muslim mystic Mirzā Asaduʾllāh Ghālib exclaimed: "When pain transgresses the limits, it becomes medicine."

Additional models of pain

Pain can also be conceptualized as a weapon used to destroy self-love in a spiritual battle. This is evident in the writings of such Christian theologians as Augustine of Hippo (354–430), as well as John Calvin (1509–1564), who conceived of the spiritual life as a battle against "the old man." Simon the Stylite (d. 459) battled his own body, and Macarius (d. 390) wrestled against the "fiends" that occupied his body. Muslim ascetics such as Abū Bakr Wāsiṭī claimed to be practicing jihad or holy war against the individual soul that deluded itself into thinking that it was divine.

The athletic model of pain is evident in the word asceticism, which Plato and Aristotle took to mean "training." The attitude revealed in the athletic model toward the body is softer than the military. Hebrews 12 describes pain as God's training for his faithful, and both Tertullian (third century) and Prudentius (fourth century) identified martyrdom with an athletic contest against false religion. Still, the strong aversion toward the flesh or individual ego is relatively mute here.

Pain can also be conceived as an alchemical purifier that transforms ordinary humans into saved souls. It acts like the fire that melts impure gold, in the words of Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century), or in Rūmī's words: "I am the fire!" Magical metaphors extend beyond alchemy or the blacksmith's trade to agricultural tropes, or in the case of the tapas (heat) of Hindu mysticism, the metaphor extends to a tool that bestows supernatural powers. Similarly, the idea that pain can miraculously transform consciousness and identity in an implicit passage is indicated by the charter of the Midwives Alliance of North America: "Labor…is a rite of passage, a psychospiritual training ground for both mother and child."

Central to the Christian conception of pain is the model of vicarious or communal suffering. Colossians 1:24 states: "Now I rejoice in my suffering for your sake." Indeed the painful death of Christ is a vicarious force that extends in effect to the entire community. Such too is the ritual destruction of the scapegoat in numerous cultures; in the Zohar 's addition to the Yom Kippur liturgy, for example, the death of the righteous atones for the sins of others.

In contemporary Western discourse on self-hurting, describing for instance the performances of "modern primitives," brain processes are often invoked to explain the heightened states of consciousness achieved. Although excitement and euphoria are often reported as a result of the secretion of beta-endorphins, the language of transcendence—unity of spirit and body, for instance—prevails: "It's an ecstasy state where no matter what happens in the body, no matter how much more intense the physical sensations become, I feel no more. Sensations just 'are'" (Mufasar, 1995, p. 5).

Meaning and Function of Pain

The methods of causing oneself or others pain in religious contexts, and the manner of articulating the nature of pain have been extremely diverse. Pain, itself a biological and psychological phenomenon, has been so deeply embedded in cultural expression that it has proven elusive and difficult to theorize. Few theorists have even attempted to focus on pain perception apart from its theoretical and ritual contexts. Four distinct approaches for understanding religious pain may be identified: cultural-symbolic, psychoanalytical, sociobiological-ethological, and psychodynamic. To simplify this range, one may say that religious pain has been reduced either to cultural interpretation or to biological analysis.

Mircea Eliade is preeminent among those theorists who refuse to "reduce" ritual performance or religious discourse to universal transcultural principles other than the sacred itself. Consequently, he argues that the pain inflicted on novices, for instance among Native Americans, is symbolic of specific cultural interpretations of the sacred, and the ritual hurt aims at "the spiritual transformation of the victim." The torture may represent a symbolic death and rebirth; the genital incisions symbolically de-sexualize the youngster to create an androgynous being for the state that precedes the new birth. In either case, the important religious phenomenon is not the sensation of pain itself but the symbolic value of its ritualized application.

Biological reductions, or ethological theories based on biology, address the question of aggression and dominance, access to females, or in some sophisticated versions, imposing ritual constraints on biological drives. For example, in On Aggression (1963) Konrad Lorenz regards the violent torture of initiates as an expression of such biological principles as the natural aggression of adults toward young sexual competitors. The highly respected theories of René Girard and Walther Burkhert ultimately resolve into such universal—"human nature"—principles. Freudian psychoanalytical theory explains the self-hurting of religious individuals, or the tortures of initiates, in broadly reductive terms. The former may represent masochistic pathology, or the ego's response to the anxiety of a profound sense of guilt. Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) discusses how the torture of youngsters may be due to aggressive and erotic drives as they manifest in competition over sexual resources, or it may serve to curtail such potentially destructive drives.

While none of these approaches focuses exclusively on the perception of pain as a distinct area of interest, Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985) isolates pain as a unique phenomenon—an overwhelming "objectless," and therefore mute, experience that destroys the victim's ability to communicate and ultimately shatters his or her entire world, including even the self. Scarry's theory, which is based on the observation of torture victims, has had a significant influence on religious scholarship. Historians of religions, especially scholars of mysticism, including Maureen Flynn and Maureen A. Tilley, now believe that mortification of the flesh is designed to "unmake the world" and eradicate language and identity through the mute power of pain.

The most recent and extended analysis of pain in religious contexts is Ariel Glucklich's Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul (2001). This book argues, based on neuropsychological and cybernetic theories, that self-inflicted pain makes the agent transparent and thereby strengthens values, which are held in high regard. The voluntary mortifications and discomforts of such mystical practitioners as Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Henry Suso dissolve personal identity while fortifying a new telos or valued goal, such as God or community. Unwanted or natural pain (e.g., illness, accidents) can be transformed into "sacred" pain through the psychological mechanisms of self-sacrifice, or by subsuming one's personal identity within a broader and more highly valued center. The neuropsychological work of Ronald Melzack and Patrick D. Wall on phantomlimb pain offers a specific and sophisticated explanation of what may be taking place when the organism is over-stimulated with pain or irritation. A shutting down or diminution of output from the central nervous system results in phenomenal experiences, which diminishes the sense of self and reinforces the religious psychology that values other sources of identity: God, Christ, community, and others. Pain here is understood in terms of its phenomenal effects, not as a pathology or a political weapon.

See Also

Healing and Medicine; Mortification; Ordeal; Suffering.

Bibliography

Bakan, David. Disease, Pain, and Sacrifice: Toward a Psychology of Suffering. Chicago, 1968. A psychoanalytical and phenomenological study of the two-fold effect of pain on the self: integrative and disintegrative (telic-centralizing and decentralizing).

Chittick, William C., trans. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. Albany, N.Y., 1983.

Daniel, E. Valentine. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley, 1984. A sophisticated combination of ethnography, ethno-psychology, and traditional Indian philosophy as tools for understanding South Indian ritual.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912). Translated by Joseph Ward Swain. New York, 1965. The foundational text for the sociology of religion, contains a large number of examples of ritualized pain, including in mourning and rites of expiation or penance.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Translated by Willard R. Trask. New York, 1965. A comprehensive collection and symbolic interpretation of initiatory ordeals from around the world.

Flynn, Maureen. "The Spiritual Uses of Pain in Spanish Mysticism." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 2 (1999): 257–278.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Translated by James Strachey. New York, 1962. One of several cultural studies based on the psychology of biological drives. Useful primarily for the insight on the cultural curtailment of drives through ritual.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore, Md., 1977. An extended and influential study of the religious and social psychology of the sacrifice.

Glucklich, Ariel. Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul. New York, 2001. A neuropsychological and psychodynamic study of the effect of self-hurting on states of consciousness sought by religious practitioners.

Jorgensen, Joseph G. The Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless. Chicago, 1972. A comprehensive overview of several rituals and a number of ideologies and theories that explain them.

Lorenz, Konrad. On Aggression. New York, 1963. One of the early texts of ethology, the precursor to sociobiology.

Melzack, Ronald. "Pain: Past, Present, and Future." Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 47 (1993): 615–629. A relatively accessible explanation of the new theory of neuromatrix and neurosignature and its effect on the understanding and treatment of pain.

Melzack, Ronald, and Patrick D. Wall. The Challenge of Pain. New York, 1983.

Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain. Berkeley, 1991. A detailed literary and cultural study of pain, including one chapter on pain in religious contexts.

Mufasar, Fakir. "Editorial: Changes of Body-State." Body Play: And Modern Primitives 1, no. 3 (1995): 4–5.

Rey, Roselyne. The History of Pain. Translated by Louise Elliott Wallace, J. A. Cadden, and S. W. Cadden. Cambridge, Mass., 1993. A comprehensive study of pain in Western medical history and the interaction between medical theory and culture.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, 1985. A literary and philosophical study of the destructive effect of extreme pain on consciousness and identity, and the creative potential embedded in this destruction.

Tilley, Maureen A. "The Ascetic Body and the Unmaking of the World of the Martyr." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 59, no. 3 (1990): 467–479.

Ariel Glucklich (2005)