Whatever Happens at all, Happens as It Should 

Just outside the French Quarter of New Orleans, on the corner of Basin and St. Louis Streets, there is an ancient necropolis called St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. When the Catholic cemetery was built, the city was still a Spanish frontier province, and as such retains some of its historic memory as an outpost of French culture. The inscriptions that mark the various above-ground monuments are commonly in French, some austere and formal, others unexpectedly tender and poignant. There is one small marker that gives no name or dates. It appears to be the tomb of a child from some time in the previous century. It is very plain, and upon the weathered stone is carved a single word: Pourquoi? “Why?” A simple epitaph that carries with it a significant and inescapable existential question. 

It is impossible to encounter this little inscription without feeling the emotional weight of its author, one that has exceeded the immediate grief that produced it. Despite the brevity of its narrative, the question being posed is not “Why did this child die?” but “Why does any of this happen at all?” Perhaps more deeply still: “Why is our world built in such a way that this is allowed to happen?” The innocents suffer, the greatest of earthly beauty decays, and every human effort inevitably dissolves into nothing. “Must all things in the last be swallowed up in death?” asked Plato’s Socrates, who was acutely aware of this phenomenon in his own time. 

Our contemporary thought has supplied many technical explanations for suffering, but these explanations are not the same thing as answers. What is more, explaining how things happen is a poor substitute for explaining why things happen. Our scientific knowledge may explain disease vectors, pathogens, and all those elements that sharpen our mortality. However, it is foolish to assume that psychological anguish can be reduced to neurological function, that the state of our interiority can be oversimplified into a series of synaptic firings. Our humanity continues to ask more of us than these kinds of flat, material explanations can answer. It challenges us with metaphysical questions, the paramount of which is: Why does it have to be this way? 

It might be said that the whole of Western philosophy and religion is intended to address this issue. The question of human suffering is certainly older than all of our contemporary institutions. We find it latent in the earliest documents of civilization; the Sumerian narrative of the Epic of Gilgamesh explores themes of transience and causality as its protagonist navigates an ecologically hostile universe. Just the same, this is echoed by the author of the Book of Job and by the various tragedians of ancient Athens. Long before anyone attempted to construct a systematic notion of theodicy, societies had already discovered the terrible reality of the disproportion between virtue and fortune. Among the commentators on this from the ancient world was the second-century Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who was famously a proponent of the philosophy of Stoicism. 

Despite the extraordinary privilege of his station in life, his reign was punctuated by various calamities that punctuated political life in late antiquity. The Antonine Plague swept repeatedly through the provinces of the empire, killing millions, all while military crises along the Danube frontier to the north demanded years of his personal attention. Seven of his fourteen children died before reaching adulthood. His co-emperor Lucius Verus died suddenly, as did Marcus’s wife Faustina. There is a persistent awareness of death that appears to penetrate his writings and his thoughts. His major surviving philosophical work, Meditations, was not composed by a man speculating about the nature of human suffering from the security of a university lecture hall. It was originally a private exercise, written by a man attempting to remain morally coherent in a world that appeared determined to demonstrate its indifference to mortal agency. 

Marcus makes several famous assertions in his work. Among the collection of his wisdom is the assertion that: “Whatever happens at all, happens as it should.” To some readers, the sentence borders on the bizarre. The proposition that pain and suffering should happen is perhaps too much to fully digest in one sitting. Why should the death of a child, or the ravages of a plague, or the betrayal of a friend need to happen at all? Viscerally, they appear wrong to our moral sensibilities and our perspective of a just universe. They offend our intuitive convictions that reality ought to possess some correspondence between the exercise of virtue and happiness. Standing before that little grave in New Orleans, it would require an almost superhuman and indecent callousness to say that whatever happened there “happened as it should.”  

However, it is not Aurelius’s point to claim that suffering is good in itself, still less that cruelty should be greeted with a studied indifference. The psychological claims of Stoicism are considerably more subtle than simply ignoring the problem of pain. Saying that something happens “as it should” is to say that no event exists independently of the world from which it arises. For Aurelius, the universe is not a collection of random unassociated accidents, and by extension the course of history is not arbitrary. It possesses a single intelligible order, governed by logos, in which everything that happens emerges from a greater and more immense web of causes that extends far beyond the comprehension of any individual. We encounter only fragments of the world, and engage with the course of time only through the limited lens of our fragile intellect. 

While this sounds fairly straightforward, it is a perspective that we often ignore. It is a distinction that is important because we judge the meaning of external events according to their relationship to ourselves. That is to say, we call something distinctively fortunate because it fulfills our own personal desires, and unfortunate because it frustrates the ends we have in mind. While these are clearly subjective, the invisible hand of the natural world recognizes no such distinction. The rainstorm that in its violent fury ruins the harvest of one farmer may save the pending harvest of another. The forest fire that brings the full force of destructive conflagration to the woods releases seeds that would not otherwise germinate. And such is the course of the world and ultimately the governing principle of human destiny. For the Stoic, this is the heart of any earthly wisdom: as the Greek ethicist Epictetus wrote, that moral instruction means “learning to desire that things should happen as they do”. 

Admittedly, there is something deeply unsettling about this proposition, as it deprives us as individuals of the sacred egoism from which we normally perceive and evaluate the world. We naturally imagine that the moral fabric of reality ought to justify itself before our own experiential tribunal. If in the course of our own life, something causes us pain, we regard the pain itself as evidence that something has gone wrong with the order of the world. Aurelius points to the childishness of this presumption and wholly reverses it. He posits that perhaps it is not the moral governance of the universe that has failed to conform itself to us, but we who have failed to understand our small place within an elegant design much more expansive than our own ego. Curiously, we find this same conclusion being drawn in the Book of Job, when the Lord appears to Job and questions who he is to make moral judgments on the phenomenological order of the universe. Job offers his own intellectual humility in response: “I have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not … I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:2-6). 

Aurelius and his Stoic compatriots are regularly suspicious of the question why, and the latent meaning that is implied when we pose this type of question. When we ask why something terrible has happened, we are not looking for a materialist explanation for the cause. The physical cause is usually known to us. What we are really demanding is justification for why it happened at all. We are coping with reality, and looking for a substantive explanation of why it has violated the arrangement we believed existed between ourselves and the moral order of the cosmos.  

For Aurelius, human beings suffer because we have implicitly converted our understanding of temporary possessions of things into permanent expectations. All of us abstractly know that, in time, our bodies will fail, our friends, family, and heroes will inevitably die, that our social reputations will one day disappear, and eventually even our names too will be forgotten. However, we operate in the world otherwise, perversely, as if an exception has somehow been negotiated on our behalf. For many, death arrives simultaneously as tragedy and insult to our perceived exceptionalism. We are wounded by the loss, but also taken aback that the power of time and nature has been enforced upon us, and imposed a condition we always knew belonged to being alive. The acceptance of fate, Amor Fati, is part of recognizing our endowed limitations in mortal clay. “The Fates guide the willing, but drag the unwilling,” as the Roman orator Seneca noted some twenty centuries ago. His observation remains uncontradicted in the course of those centuries, because the state of our hubris has not changed in that time. We still resist the course of time, believing that it should be different, for no other reason than that we feel it as such. 

The difficulty here is that there is an enormous distance between accepting the proposition of mortality, of the transience of the world, philosophically, and encountering it personally. It is easy enough to take the nebulous position, acknowledging that every child is mortal and is subject to the frailty that is part and parcel of our humanity. However, it is another matter entirely to bury one’s own child. The exercise of philosophy becomes impotent precisely at the point where abstract pain acquires a name and a face. The little inscription in St. Louis Cemetery exposes the limitation of every neat philosophical system. Its singular question (Pourquoi?) is not intended to be an intellectual inquiry, delving into the fine print of the question of theodicy. It is a protest against the temporal state of affairs. 

Again, we are met with the practical directives of Aurelius’s wisdom. He does not answer the protest, as no one truly can. There are no words that could give even a satisfactory explanation for such pain. Instead, he assumes the pragmatic position and attempts to teach us how to live when there is no answer readily present. For much of humanity, peace begins when the demand that reality be otherwise is finally relinquished, when we step away from the insistence that our vision of the way things should be is definitive.  

This should not be interpreted to mean a passive state of acceptance of evil in our world. A reasonable observation of ethical principles requires that strong actions be taken precisely whenever action remains possible. This is a prohibition against those things that are beyond our ability to control or even navigate. The happy and perhaps even moral person recognizes our limitations, and does not insist that our happiness depends on controlling what lies beyond our power. Morally, we are responsible for what we do with the world that has been given to us, not for the one we wished we inhabited. 

Aurelius asks us to abandon the ghosts of moral pretense. What has happened in the world has entered fully into the structure of reality and cannot be extracted from it. To wish that the events of the past were otherwise is ultimately to wish for the impossible, a different universe, perhaps even a universe beyond causality. Here Stoicism approaches something beyond a simple philosophical proposition; it is the borderland where wisdom transmutes itself into faith. To say that “whatever happens at all, happens as it should” ultimately requires confidence that the whole possesses an intelligibility invisible from the vantage point of the fragment. The part cannot comprehend the whole; the individual atom is blind to the vastness of the universe. There is humility in such a proposition, because it concedes that the hidden power that animates the universe is under no obligation to make itself comprehensible to us. 

There is something severe in this kind of wisdom, but also merciful. We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. Stat sua cuique dies (“each has his appointed day”) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil’s Aeneid, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them. 

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