Thinking about agentive pain in religious history and ethnography

Pain inflicted as punishment can be eagerly embraced by those on whom it is inflicted and transformed into something other than what was intended. Sadomasochism (which I discuss in the next chapter) is one ex­ample, although I shall argue that it should not be identified as merely a secular version of a phenomenon familiar to us from the domain of reli­gion—and therefore as the pathology underlying particular religious prac­tices.

Historians of late antiquity have made us familiar with the fact that sovereignty in. the early Roman empire was realized to a great degree through public demonstrations of the emperors power and munificence. The theatrical torture of certain categories of criminal was part of this nec­essary display of power. Famously, among those so tortured were the early Christian martyrs. Judith Perkins in her book The Suffering Self states that early Christian martyrologies “refuse to read the martyrs’ broken bodies as defeat, but reverse the reading, insisting on interpreting them as symbols of victory over society’s power.”³⁵ Far from shunning physical suffering, the martyrs actively sought to live it. Like Christs passion on the cross, the martyrs’ passivity was an act of triumph. That openness to pain was pre­cisely part of the structure of their agency as Christians. This is what makes

35. Judith Perkins, The Suffering Self: Pain and Narrative in the Early Chris­tian Era, New York: Roudedge, 1995, p. 117.

its description as “a symbol of victory over society’s power” (a secular moti­vation) inapposite. It was what it claimed to Be: an empowerment through the endurance of what Christ was believed to have suffered on the cross.

However, it is not the symbolic significance of martyrdom that I want to focus on here but its effectiveness in creating new spaces for secu­lar action.

In the world of late antiquity, the Christian community was posi­tively oriented (as the ancient world had not been) to sickness and human suffering. Where sickness could not be healed, Christians insisted that pain could be understood as valuable. This was different from two traditions that were more or less contemporaneous with the early Christian persecu­tions related in the martyrologies: Stoic moral philosophy (with its em­phasis on self-mastery, its denial of externals such as suffering), and Galenic medicine (that regarded pain as a bodily condition subject to ap­propriate technical intervention).

Perkins argues that Stoicism was a ruling ideology: “Epictitus’ em­phasis on the internal, on self-mastery, and self-formation, as well as his de­nial of the importance of externals [such as suffering], would have served to divert the attention of his students and others like them away from at­tending to social or material conditions. His teaching supported the status quo, and any affirmation of the status quo acts to affirm an elite’s position. Stoic insistence that poverty and social position did not matter fitted into the elite agenda better than into an underprivileged one: as does the corre­sponding counsel that what did, in fact, matter was how well you did at being poor, imprisoned, or politically unpopular. This teaching, along with emphasis on control directed at the interior self, had significant relevance for the social body; it would work to restrain social as well as personal dis­turbances.”³⁶ But this resort to the notion of false consciousness to explain political domination seems to me weak. In the first place Stoicism was an ethic intended for the elite rather than the masses. As such, it encouraged withdrawal from corrupt public life and inattention to social and material conditions.

36. Ibid., pp. 84-85.

change life—-might well be mistaken, it is not in itself a denial that life is ultimately unjust. On the contrary, it is precisely because the world is viewed as unjust and filled with misfortune that Stoicism prescribes psy­chological remedies.

Perkins’s discussion of ancient medicine is more interesting. Galen’s understanding of the sick body, she tells us, was adapted by the early Christians in their distinctive treatment of pain. Thus by a paradoxical de­velopment, the Christian embrace of suffering led, she tells us, to a greater concern for—and therefore a new kind of secular activity directed at—the diseased, the poor, and the despised members of society. If Perkins is right, then we find here not merely another meaning of pain but also another economy of action. The self-subjection of these Christians to pain (at least as represented in the martyrologies on which Perkins draws) was itself a form of agency not because of their active intention (whatever that may have been), nor primarily because of the symbolic significance of suffering (“a text to be read”³⁷). It was a form of agency because, as part of an emerg­ing tradition, their public suffering made a difference not only to them­selves (to their own potential actions) as members of a new faith but also to the world in which they lived: it required that one’s own pain and the pain of others be engaged with differently.

The distinction between looking for the symbolic meaning of pain (as an ideology) and for its agentive function may be illustrated further by ref­erence to an ethnography of pain in childbirth among North American re­ligious women published by the anthropologist Pamela Klassen.

“Perhaps in late-twentieth-century America,” Klassen writes, “where women are taught to be observers and critics of their own bodies from out­side, the pain of childbirth puts women back in their bodies. In this spe­cific context, the counter-cultural force of pain holds an empowering, and for some, salvific dimension. In accord with Carolyn Walker Bynum, I cau­tiously assert that our culture may finally need something of the medieval sense, reflected so clearly in the use of birthing and nursing as symbols for

37. Ibid., p. 152.

salvation, that generativity and suffering can be synonymous.’ Many home-birthing women are working towards such a coupling.”³⁸

But I want to think of the pain of childbirth not as a meaningful ex­perience, and not as an image subversive of male arrogance (on that score, alas, it has not been historically very effective). Pain may be thought of di­rectly as a constitutive element of giving birth. My point is not that birthing should be accepted as a moral basis of the female claim to em­powerment. Still less that her ability to face pain courageously is a virtue. It is that particular women in particular places and particular times actu­ally give birth in pain—and this creates a new situation for the mother herself and for others. For those who can exercise it, the power to bring an­other life and therefore other relations into the world in pain is no less agentive for being particularized as well as unwilled (I refer, of course, not to the decision to have a child but to the process of conception, pregnancy, and birth).

Of course mothering is possible when physical pain is prevented or alleviated by analgesics. I do not wish to be taken as saying that painful birth is intrinsically valuable (even though the religious women studied by Klassen preferred giving birth at home among family members and with­out the presence of professional doctors). My point is only that when pain is a constitutive part of birthing it is not simply the negative experience of a patient, as biomedicine tends to regard it, but an aspect of a distinctive social act in which others assist. What I want to emphasize is that in the cases Klassen describes, pain is not the isolable condition of an individual body to be finally eliminated by chemical or surgical intervention. It is in­tegral to an activity that reproduces and sustains human relationships. For how pain is felt is in some measure dependent on how it is expressed, and how it is expressed is dependent on social relationships.

It is not the symbolic meaning attributed to motherhood (or to pain) that concerns me here, any more than the self-interpretation of individuals as mothers. What I think matters is the becoming and being “a mother” by means of the practical methods employed in various traditions. For the act of birthing doesn’t merely produce another living body, it also creates a vi­tal relationship that is imbued with sensitivity to pain, the relationship that binds mother and child actively together. The mother is an agent as a con­sequence of what she has done in a particular social situation—after the

38. Pamela Klassen, ‘“Sliding Around between Pain and Pleasure’: Home Birth and Visionary Pain,” Scottish Journal of Religious Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1998, p. 66.

Thinking about Agency and Pain 89 event, as it were—and not because of her conscious intention. (The de­sire that she have a child is not the mothers alone; other relatives are also involved.)

Our tendency to think of childbirth as passive because unwilled, and uncontrolled is deep-rooted.

I discuss a final example of the role of pain in the economy of ac­tion—this time from the Islamic tradition, aspects of which have been de­scribed in relation to movements of piety in contemporary Cairo in two ethnographic studies by Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind.⁴⁰ Both studies are concerned with a tradition that is based on the idea of the soul that is at least as old as Aristotle and that has been absorbed into Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam. This tradition requires us to attend not merely to the idea of embodiment (that human action and experience are sited in a material body) but also to the idea of ensoulment—the idea that the living human body is an integrated totality having developable capaci­ties for activity and experience unique to it, the capacities for sensing, imagining, and doing that are culturally mediated.

Although the living body is the object of sensations (and in that sense passive), its ability to suffer, to respond perceptually and emotionally to ex­ternal and internal causes, to use its own pain in unique ways in particular social relationships, makes it active. Many traditions therefore attribute to the living human body the potential to be shaped (the power to shape it­self) for good or ill.

Whether passive or active, the living body’s materiality is regarded as an essential means for cultivating what such traditions define as virtuous conduct and for discouraging what they consider as vice. The role of fear and hope, of felicity and pain, is central to such practices. According to this view of the living body, the more one exercises a virtue the easier it be-

39. Susan J. Brison. Brison herself takes a view opposed to de Beauvoirs.

46. Charles Hirschkind, “Technologies of Islamic Piety: Cassette-Sermons and the Ethics of Listening” (Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1999); Saba Mahmood, “Women’s Piety and Embodied Discipline: The Islamic Resurgence in Contemporary Egypt” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1998).

comes. On the other hand, the more one gives in to vice, the harder it is to act virtuously. This is precisely how many Muslims interpret the repeated Qur’anic declaration to the effect that God seals the hearts of stubborn sin­ners. The punishment for repeated wickedness is to become the sort of per­son one is: unable to distinguish true speech from false, and divine speech from human speech—a person who cannot live the virtuous life that God requires of her or him. Time is not reversible.

Conscious intentionality typically is here seen aS important where in­experience or vice prevails, for it is in those conditions that the inertial re­sistance of the body, as well as its fragility, need to be addressed deliberately by responsible practice. Note that I speak here of the formation of virtues (fada’il) and sensibilities (hisas). Rites of worship {‘ibdddt)—whose regu­lar practice is in fact necessary to the cultivation of the virtues and sensi­bilities required of a Muslim—always require the silent enunciation of one’s intention {niyya) to perform the prayer {salat), and so forth, at the commencement of the rite. The niyya is therefore an integral part of the rite, a form of conscious commitment initiating acts of worship that must itself be cultivated as an aspect of one’s continuous faith. Iman—usually translated into English as “frith”—is not a singular epistemological means that guarantees God’s existence for the believer. It is better translated as the virtue of faithfulness toward God, an unquestioning habit of obedience that God requires of those faithful to him (muminin), a disposition that has to be cultivated like any other, and that links one to others who are faithfid, dirough mutual trust and responsibility.

Both Mahmood and Hirschkind provide detailed descriptions of practices directed at the cultivation of Islamic conduct in which painful emotions—fear and remorse, for example—are seen as central to the practice of moral discrimination. In different ways, their accounts reveal that “virtuous fear” (taqwa) is regarded not simply as a spur to action but as integral to action itself. Apart from being necessary to the develop­ment of moral discrimination, the endurance of pain is considered to be a necessary means of cultivating the virtue of sabr (endurance, persever­ance, self-control) that is itself basic to all processes of virtue-acquisition.

Physical pain and damage to the body are not celebrated in the cen­tral Sunni tradition of Islam, as they are for example among; the early Ghristian martyrs-—nor does pain have the same role in its religious disci­pline. But forms of suffering are nonetheless intrinsic to the kind of agent a devout Muslim aspires to be. The most important of these is the univer­sal experience of dying and death. When “the time comes” the devout Muslim is required to let go. The suffering among survivors generated by the loss of those they love is shared through prescribed practices of burial and bereavement (although the entire structure of burial practices makes it more difficult for mourning women to achieve closure than for men). The devout Muslim seeks to cultivate virtue and repudiate vice by a constant awareness of his or her own earthly finitude, trying to achieve the state of equilibrium that the Qur’an calls an-nafi al-mutma’inna, “the self at peace.” Penalties, whether emerging as incapacity from within the living body’s functions, or imposed as punishment on the body externally, are re­garded as a necessary part of learning how to act appropriately. This form­ative process is set within the Islamic tradition of mutual discipline: al-amr bil-ma'rufwan-nahy 'an al-munkar^t^tiiPty, “the requiring of what is good and the rejection of what is reprehensible”).⁴¹ The individual’s acquisition of appropriate agency and its exercise are articulated by responsibility, a re­sponsibility not merely of the agent but of the entire community of Mus­lims severally and collectively. If religious behavior is to be defined in terms of responsibility, then we have here a case of behavior that acquires its sense not from a historical teleology but from a biographical one in which the in­dividual seeks to acquire the capacities and sensibilities internal to a reli­gious tradition (al-sunna al-dtniyya) that is oriented by,an eschatology ac­cording to which he or she stands alone on the Day of Judgment to account for his or her life. In this tradition, the body-and-its-capacities is not owned solely by the individual but is subject to a variety of obligations held by others as fellow Muslims. There is therefore a continuous, unre­solved tension between responsibility as individual and metaphysical on the one hand, and as collective and quotidian on the other—that is, be­tween eschatology and sociology.

In referring sketchily to aspects of Islamic corporal discipline I do not wish to repeat the old secularist prejudice that religion is essentially about fear of punishment. My concern is to point to the way in which certain traditions use pain to create a space for moral action that articulates this- world-in-the-next. Thus pain is used and justified by modern state law (in­cluding the law of war) to uphold order and attain security. Muslim and

41. The thirteenth-century theologian Ibn Taymiyya’s Amr bi al-ma'rufwa al-nahy ‘an al-munkar has been reprinted in Cairo several times since 1979, to­gether with a long explanatory introduction by the modern Egyptian editor Muhammad Jamil Ghazi.

Christian princes have also used pain for this purpose. But in addition, Christian and Islamic traditions have, in their different ways, regarded suf­fering as the working through of worldly evil. For the suffering subject, not all pain is tP be avoided; rowepain must be actively endured if evil is to be transcended. According to Christian and Islamic traditions “evil” is an in­trinsic part of the way this world is constituted. As long as the world lasts, evil can never be permanently eliminated, only temporarily overcome.⁴² Thus pain does not simply constitute irrefutable evidence of the cor­poreal ground of experience,, it is also a way of constituting the epistemo­logical status of “the body.” As well as its moral potentialities.