“As so many other things, pain too is known only by its fruits”

I woke early this morning to prepare for my Warrior Academy Yoga Podcast. Today’s topic is on “Suffering.” I like to understand, best I can, the topic of discussion and I find it interesting to look up the Greek roots to words for some strange reason.

“Suffer” has two roots. One is “Sub” which means “under” and can also mean “inferior” (like subcontinent, subordinate, etc), The second part is “Ferre”, which means to carry or bear. Essentially meaning to “undergo” or “endure”

I always found it a smart quote “the opposite of love is not hate but rather indifference.” However, while looking up the Greek meaning of “suffer” I stumbled upon “Apathy, (freedom from suffering).

From “apathes” (without feeling), “a”- (without) + pathos (emotion, feeling, suffering). Originally a positive quality; sense of “indolence of mind, indifference to what should excite.”

This lead me to look up “pathos” which in Greek means “suffering.” The English word “Pathology” literally means “the study of suffering.” “Allopathy” means “the treatment of suffering.”

From there, are words like “Sympathy,” (the sensitivity to others’ suffering), and “empathy,” (the action of, or the capacity for, vicarious experience of others’ sufferings).

It gets a bit more interesting. In “rhetoric” (the art of persuading an audience) there are three forms of persuasion; “ethos,”(convincing the audience through the speakers credibility and qualifications) “pathos” (using emotion to sway the audience like appealing to fear or hope) and “logos.”(a logical appeal using facts and figures).

“Pathos ,” beyond suffering also means “feeling” and “emotion.” Which would demonstrate that much of our suffering is built upon caring, feeling and our emotions.

Which would also lead us to “Passion.” Which in Greek is defined as “suffering” or “enduring”. Also, “strong emotion, desire” or suffering for something you desire. Again the root is similar.

If you look at the cause of disease that would be “pathogens” which would be “pathos” combined with “gen” or “birth.” Alluding to the fact that suffering stems from our birth or that life is suffering. Friedrich Nietzsche said “What is the best for man? The best for man is not to be born, and if he is once born, then the second best is to die soon after birth.” He understood the nature of suffering and man’s sadness over suffering.

However, the Greeks also knew a very important fact, that out of suffering arises knowledge. “Here are two things brought together, one of which mankind would like to blot out (suffering), but also knowledge, one of the highest possessions of life.”

The lecturer Rudolf Steiner wrote, “Remember how in some tragedy the tragic hero has stood before your eyes. The poet leads the hero again and again through suffering and conflicts full of suffering until he comes to the point where pain reaches its climax and finds relief in the end of the physical body (death). Then there lives in the soul of the spectator sympathy with the tragic hero and sadness that such sufferings are possible, but it appears that from the sight of suffering man was exalted and built up, that he has seen the suffering submerged in death and that out of death has come the assurance that victory exists over pain. Yes, even over death. So we see here too that a highest element in the consciousness of humanity is linked to suffering. And when we see how these things, small and great, ever again rise to the surface, how they actually form the elemental part of the whole of human nature and consciousness, then it must indeed seem to us as if in some way suffering is connected with the highest in man.

This is meant to point to the connection between earthly existence and pain and suffering. It is to show how we can realize the meaning of suffering and pain when we see how they harden, crystallize in physical things and organisms up to man, and how through a dissolution of what has hardened, the Spirit can be born in us again, when we see that the origin of suffering and pain is in the Spirit. The Spirit gives us beauty, strength, wisdom, the transformed picture of the original abode of pain. A brilliant man, Fabre d’Olivet, made a right comparison when he wished to show how the highest, noblest, purest in human nature arises out of pain. He said that the arising of wisdom and beauty out of suffering is comparable to a process in nature, to the birth of the valuable and beautiful pearl. For the pearl is born from the sickness of the oyster, from the destruction inside the pearl-oyster. As the beauty of the pearl is born out of disease and suffering, so are knowledge, noble human nature and purified human feeling born out of suffering and pain.

So we may well say with the old Greek poet, Aeschylos: Out of suffering arises learning; out of learning, knowledge. We may say of pain that we have grasped it only when we know it not only in itself but in what proceeds from it. As so many other things, pain too is known only by its fruits.”

(from Rudolph Steiner’s THE ORIGIN OF SUFFERING)