The vale of tears, before the church

Here is a question that is sharper than it looks: the idea that this earthly life is a vale of tears, a trial you endure patiently for a reward in the hereafter, was that already there before the church? Or did Christianity plant it in the Western soul? The answer is more nuanced than yes or no, and it touches something that runs through the whole history of power: whoever controls the meaning of suffering controls the people.

The ancient world: suffering without guilt

Look first at the world before Christianity, the Greece of Homer, the Rome of the emperors. There is plenty of suffering there, but it carries a completely different meaning than it would later. The gods of Olympus are not moral judges who weigh your soul; they are powerful, capricious beings whom you keep on your side with offerings. And crucially: suffering is no punishment for sin and no sign of a corrupted nature. If you suffered, that was fate, tragic, not moral. There is no original sin, no idea that man comes into the world guilty by nature, no vale of tears you have to sit out. There is a hard life, sometimes a beautiful life, and after it usually a drab shadow existence, not as punishment, simply as an end.

The philosophers went further. Epicurus taught that there is nothing to fear: not the gods, who do not concern themselves with us, and not death, for as long as you are here, death is not, and when death is here, you are not. The aim was peace, here and now, by living wisely and moderately. No vale of tears, a garden. Literally: his school was called the Garden.

What Christianity added

Christianity did not bring suffering, that was always there, and materially the life of a Roman slave was presumably harder than any theology could ever make it. What it brought was a new meaning of suffering. Three things that scarcely existed before. Original sin: man comes into the world not neutral but broken. The sanctification of suffering itself: the crucified God, the martyr as hero, blessed are those who mourn, suffering became a path, a merit. And life as a passage: this world as a temporary trial, with real life in the hereafter.

For those who suffered, the vast majority, this was a tremendous comfort: your misery is not meaningless, it counts, it is seen, it is rewarded. The sharp answer to the question is therefore: the hard life was always there, but the idea that this hard life is a meaningful passage to a better hereafter, that was largely introduced by Christianity.

Gain and price, honestly weighed

Both sides are true, and that is what makes it powerful. The gain was enormous: the idea that every human being has a soul of infinite worth, the slave as much as the emperor, the root of much of what we later came to call human rights and charity. The price was what critics pointed to: a possible devaluation of this life in favour of the next, and a message, suffer now, be rewarded later, that any ruler relishes. Anaesthetic and comfort at once.

A thought to take with you, and explicitly a hypothesis: perhaps the enduring Western inclination to make suffering "meaningful", also in secular form, in the language of therapy or the cult of the heroic struggle, is a Christian legacy that has outlived Christianity itself. And a sober question for today: which stories about "necessary suffering" or "a deserved reward later" circulate in your world. And who stands to gain from your believing them?