The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis

by Jerome A. Miller

This book can best be described as an extended meditation on suffering, phenomenological in method and dialectical in point of view. The angle the author takes is that of moral self-examination rather that conventional scholarly inquiry, and his aim is to think through and evaluate a fundamental claim of our culture, from Aeschylus to Solzhenitsyn, that suffering is the greatest spiritual teacher.

To bring the argument closer to home, Professor Miller focuses on the experience of crisis as the undermining of our attempts, at all costs, to keep control of our lives. This leads him to discuss topics such as the nature of vulnerability, the difference―as sketched by Heidegger―between ordinary fear and metaphysical dread, the ordinary avoidance of suffering, and the heroic willingness to embrace it exemplified by Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra .

But this is a philosophical essay, not a historical monograph, and Miller's goal is to lead the reader ever deeper in to the heart of crisis where all our illusions about control are stripped away and we forced to face, like Oedipus, the harshest reality of that even our existence is not something we can claim as our own. It is here, and only here, Miller claims, the issue of religious conversion can be and must be seriously faced.

This is a demanding book, as exhilarating as it is relentless in its unmasking of the evasions and duplicities with which we shore up our day-to-day lives. The late William F. Lynch, SJ, author of Christ and Apollo , called it "a profoundly moral study of man." To read it is to risk changing your life.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology

215 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1988

About the author

JEROME ALOYSIUS MILLER earned his Ph.D. from Georgetown University and is now professor emeritus of philosophy at Salisbury University, Maryland. Specializing in philosophy of religion and Continental philosophy, he has authored 'The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis' (1988) and 'In the Throe of Wonder: Intimations of the Sacred in a Post-Modern World' (1992). He has completed work on a yet-unpublished work tentatively titled 'In the Throe of the Future: A Traumatological Inquiry into History, Culture, and Normative Order.'

Reviews

[Jackal42 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book maps a sequence of calamitous and yet transcendent events to and of consciousness that is the result of the continuous and excessive obstruction of 'the-will-to-control'. It is here we find crisis as a kind of horrific revelation of fatality, a fatality that includes death but is also beyond it, a fatality which is the recognition of being without exception a victim of existence. The book begins with this veiled consciousness of horror but through various and harrowing transcendent turns maps the arrival of consciousness to a kind of reverent awe of existence, a deep rooted and humble acceptance of fatality itself.

For me the key theme this book explicitly brings to focus is the constitutional human compulsion to control in the face of the chaotic futility of existence, and the contortions of the self to maintain the illusion of agency. This is a theme that I think is an essential part of the human character. A theme which although it can be found in other existential works on the human condition, you often have to read between the lines to find it.

[Jake McCulley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for the faint of heart. Will challenge you emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually. Like Nietzsche but a couple of steps more depressing. Still, it can be life-affirming at rare moments.