The Problem of Pain in the Light of Thomas Aquinas’ Anthropology

Abstract

The Aquinas’ conception of sorrow is worth helping our understanding of a question of great account today, since we live in a dramatic situation in which we have to encounter the unprecedented seriousness of choices in the ground of ethics and, in particular, in bio-ethics. The main root of the recent disorientation seems to be a kind of transgressive and permissive emotivism which considers suffering as the highest evil. From this standpoint, everything can be done in order to get rid of it. However this implies an insourmountable contradiction : in an attempt to avoid suffering, we go so far as to inflict sufferings – so much that human beings are eliminated. The Aquinas’ rational research shows through persuasive arguments that suffering isn’t the highest evil and that there is a way to heal the wound that suffering bears in human life. Therefore, according to Thomas’ perspective, we have to consider suffering as a passion which can be led by reason.