Compassion and suffering: Clive Ashwin has some lessons from the arts

‘The historical realities demanding compassion are constantly changing.’

Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake, by the French seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin (on display at the National Gallery, and pictured) tells a curious and macabre story. In the foreground a man lies dead at the edge of a lake, in the coils of a huge serpent. A second man, who has witnessed the scene, flees with his arms outstretched in horror to raise the alarm.

A washerwoman resting by the roadside looks up and reacts to the running man and wonders what the fuss is about. In the distance some fishermen set out for the evening’s work, unaware that anything of interest has taken place. Far away, in a city illuminated by the rays of the setting sun, we imagine people are settling down for the evening, preparing a meal and looking forward to social activities.

Poussin rarely painted a picture without intending some deep moral or philosophical meaning. The painting can be interpreted as a pictorial allegory of the nature of one of the central values of the Quaker belief system: compassion, the will to recognise and mitigate the suffering of others.

Suffering that is witnessed directly makes an immediate and deep impact upon the witness (the man running up the road). Events we learn of by report arouse our curiosity but do not necessarily galvanise us into action (the washerwoman sitting by the roadside). And the greater the distance, in space or time, between us and the event, the less likely we are to respond (the fishermen and the people of the distant city).

The challenge of compassionate thinking runs through Quaker thought like a thread, as it does the books of the New Testament, as an indispensable element of a balanced spiritual condition. In 1975 London Yearly Meeting set down the challenge: ‘We… have not yet any effective idea about how to embody compassion into the essential structure of our society’ (Quaker faith & practice 25.12).

Because the historical realities demanding compassion are constantly changing, this is a challenge which must be faced anew by every generation of any faith, and that includes Quakers. Christ’s example presents us with a model of compassion according to which we respond directly to immediate needs, reflected in the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The potential to feel compassion for the suffering of others is one of the hallmarks of true humanity, and a foundation of enlightenment. This is the focus of Wagner’s last opera Parsifal, with its central motif durch Mitleid wissend (enlightenment through compassion).

If you found an abandoned child at your door, you would take it in, feed it, nurse it, and take a personal interest in its future welfare. You might even devote your life to caring for it – this is the central theme of George Eliot’s profound novel Silas Marner. But if you see the same child on television as part of a charitable appeal, you might assume that it is someone else’s responsibility and change channels.

Before the modern age we were protected from the force and immediacy of much human suffering by both distance and time. As a child in the forties I saw black and white newsreels of events like the dropping of the atomic bombs, the liberation of Belsen, and the bloodshed which followed Indian partition, just as we now witness tragic events unfolding in the Ukraine.

But at that time it was difficult for children or adults to respond to the suffering they saw on the screen. These were often regarded as events ‘in a faraway land, between people of whom we know nothing’ (as Neville Chamberlain said of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia). Besides, we had suffered many years of austerity, fear and loss, which had numbed the ability to feel compassion for others, however acute their suffering. In some cases there was even a sense of justified retribution inflicted upon those who had made us suffer.

Modern technology has dissolved the intervals of space and time which used to govern our information and news services, creating what Marshall McLuhan called ‘the global village’. Every day, wars, famines, natural disasters, and all forms of human suffering, are paraded before us in vivid colours via television, sometimes in real time as they are taking place.

The experience can produce a form of ‘compassion fatigue’ with two extremes. On the one hand, we can become hardened to images of suffering alternating with advertisements for cars and shampoo, eventually becoming indifferent and unresponsive. On the other, we can become so preoccupied with the suffering of others that we cease to enjoy our own life or attend to the immediate needs of those around us.

It is possible to become so preoccupied with the scale of distant suffering that we fail to attend to desperate need on our doorstep. Mrs Jellyby, in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, is so obsessed with raising funds for her fanciful charitable project in Africa that she neglects the needs of her home, husband and children, with the result that her family is bankrupted and her daughter comes to detest her.

Dickens was arguably the most compassionate philanthropist of his age, drawing attention through his writing and campaigning to the plight of children, the poor, the weak and the dispossessed. His novels were instrumental in bringing about fundamental reforms affecting every aspect of society. But Mrs Jellyby was an example of what he called ‘telescopic philanthropy’, in which compassion for some remote cause prevents us from recognising or responding to the immediate needs which surround us.

Maintaining a balance between proximity and distance is a difficult one. Perhaps a start is to remind ourselves that almost everyone we meet could be carrying some kind of burden of grief or loss, such as an untimely bereavement, a grievous injustice or a gnawing regret. The exercise of compassion begins with an attitude of mind to all those who surround us, regardless of age, race or cultural background.

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