On a note from an agenda, after Viktor Frankl
The greatest problem in contemporary society is that people feverishly seek the satisfaction of pleasures and flee from suffering! — Frankl (as recorded in the author’s agenda)
Two Verbs, One Sickness
The sentence has two verbs that seem opposed: to seek and to flee. Man seeks pleasure and flees suffering. But these are not two movements; they are one, seen from two sides: a line drawn between a pole to be approached and a pole to be avoided. And the adjective that binds them is the heaviest word of all: feverishly. Fever is not the disease but the sign that the body is fighting something. To seek feverishly is to seek without rest, without measure, with an urgency that betrays a lack deeper than the one the sought object can fill.
Viktor Frankl, a psychiatrist who passed through the Nazi camps and wrote afterwards about the man who searches for meaning, speaks here as a witness, not as a theorist. His word deserves to be received with respect, because it was paid for with a life. We will not “baptize” him, nor correct him; we will listen, and see how his observation sounds in the inner key of the Orthodox tradition.
What Frankl Saw
Frankl held that man is moved neither by the so-called pleasure principle (Freud) nor by the will to power (Adler), but, at the deepest level, by the will to meaning. Where meaning is missing there appears what he called the existential vacuum: an emptiness in which a person grows bored, restless, anesthetized. Pleasure does not fill this emptiness; it only covers it for a moment. He also observed that happiness cannot be pursued directly: it must ensue, as a consequence of something done for the sake of something other than itself. And of suffering he says that man is also homo patiens, able to suffer with meaning, and that suffering, when it cannot be avoided, can become the very stuff of meaning. He liked to cite a phrase of Nietzsche: whoever has a why to live for can bear almost any how.
But he also warns that avoidable suffering must be removed; only what cannot be removed asks to be faced with meaning. This is therefore not a praise of pain, but a refusal of the flight from it when that flight means fleeing from life.
The Paradox of Pleasure
Philosophers have long called it the “paradox of hedonism”: whoever aims directly at pleasure misses it. Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, X) said that pleasure accompanies and completes an activity, as the bloom completes youth in its prime, as an addition. If you tear pleasure away from the activity it should accompany, you have torn the flower from the stem. Epicurus himself, so often invoked as the patron of debauchery, specified that his pleasure was the absence of pain and disturbance, won through moderation. He would not recognize today’s fever either.
Psychology has measured this trap from several angles. Brickman and Campbell named the “hedonic treadmill” the adaptation that returns us to our earlier level, however high we climb. Gilbert and Wilson showed that we forecast badly how much things will delight or hurt us (the impact bias). Berridge and Robinson distinguished “wanting” from “liking”: the system that drives us toward something can stay lit even when satisfaction fades. The fever the text speaks of is exactly this: craving without rest, wanting without liking.
The Flight That Multiplies Pain
The other verb, to flee, has research beside it too. Steven Hayes and his colleagues described “experiential avoidance”: the attempt not to feel what hurts tends to maintain and amplify the pain. Daniel Wegner showed, in the well-known “white bear” experiment, that the thought you try to banish returns stronger. Clinically, many anxiety disorders are sustained precisely by avoidance: what is never met cannot be taught to stop being dangerous.
So flight not only fails to escape suffering; it feeds it. Here, in modern language, is what the Fathers taught long ago: that a passion grows by yielding and is healed by encounter and patience.
The Pair That Binds the Chain
St. Maximus the Confessor sees in Adam’s fall a turning of man toward the pleasure of the senses, from which pain was born as a consequence. For him fallen nature is moved by the pair pleasure–pain (cf. To Thalassius 61): the one begets the other. Whoever pursues the first makes himself, without knowing it, the companion of the second. This is why in the spiritual life one does not cut off one end of the pair and keep the other; what is asked is freedom from the chain.
St. Paul says it without detour: “She who lives in luxury is dead even while she lives” (1 Tim. 5:6), and in the last days men will be “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim. 3:4). The Greek word, philedonoi, is the one that gives hedonism its name. And the parable of poor Lazarus says with a simplicity hard to avoid: “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus likewise evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish” (Lk. 16:25).
What the Church Does Not Say
With care, we must also say what the text does not say, in an Orthodox reading. Suffering is not a good in itself. God did not make it; it entered the world with the fall and with death. The Church does not call to pain for the sake of pain: she blesses the physician (St. Luke was a doctor), prays for healing, and the Lord Himself in Gethsemane prayed that the cup might pass from Him (Mt. 26:39). Asceticism is not a search for pain but a freedom from the tyranny of pleasure, practiced with measure and with the counsel of a spiritual father.
And there is one more thing, one that speaks of love: to the person who is suffering now, one does not hand out theories. Job’s friends sat with him in silence for seven days (Job 2:13), and the harm began when they began to “explain.” The meaning of suffering is disclosed to the one who bears it, in its own time; it is not imposed from outside.
Two Kinds of Sorrow
Tradition makes a distinction that frees: “Godly sorrow produces repentance leading to salvation, not to be regretted; but the sorrow of the world produces death” (2 Cor. 7:10). There is a pain that opens and a pain that closes. St. John Climacus devotes a whole step (Step 7) to “joy-making mourning,” the way in which the heart’s sorrow becomes, without contradiction, the wellspring of joy. And St. Isaac the Syrian says in essence that no one has ascended to heaven by bodily ease.
The text from the agenda speaks, then, of a particular flight: the flight from the suffering that could be faced, from the godly sorrow we avoid because it asks something of us. Not about pain as such, but about the refusal to let it teach us.
Anesthesia as a Way of Life
Our society has found remedies for many real pains, and we should rejoice in that. But beside them it has also built a culture of anesthesia: every moment of emptiness, waiting, solitude or boredom is filled on the spot. Our attention is hunted by systems designed to feed “wanting” without ever satisfying it. And the deepest pains, the experience of death, of old age, of loneliness, of one’s own powerlessness, are the ones we strive hardest not to look at.
We have paid the price of this flight: people who can have almost everything but can no longer have peace. For peace is not found at the end of any pleasure, but at the end of an encounter.
Christ: Neither Flight Nor Pursuit
The Lord neither fled suffering nor sought it. The prayer in Gethsemane has just this form: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will” (Mt. 26:39). The recoil of nature, natural and sinless, is acknowledged; but the obedience of love is stronger. And the Epistle to the Hebrews says that Christ “for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame” (Heb. 12:2). The joy did not come after the cross as a foreign reward, but through it.
That is why at Resurrection Matins we sing: “Behold, through the Cross joy has come into all the world.” The Cross is not the opposite of joy but its gate, not because pain has in itself the power to save, but because the Crucified is the One who conquered death. Whoever flees the cross at any price separates himself, without wanting to, from the road of joy too.
St. Paul follows Him: “heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him, that we may also be glorified together” (Rom. 8:17). And “our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far greater and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17).
A Contentment That Is Not Sought
In Romanian the word mulțumire has two meanings: what we feel when we are satisfied, and what we say when we give thanks. The agenda text speaks of the “satisfaction of pleasures” — and, without meaning to, shows us more than it says. Whoever seeks contentment as satisfaction loses it, and loses with it contentment as thanksgiving. For gratitude is what remains when you have understood that everything is gift, not conquest.
“In everything give thanks,” says the Apostle (1 Thess. 5:18), and in everything means also in what hurts. This is why the Liturgy is called Eucharist, thanksgiving: because there, beside the Cross and the Tomb, thanksgiving no longer depends on what we have received but on Who has received us. This is the contentment that does not flee: you do not catch it by running, you receive it by standing still.
Frankl put his finger on the wound: the feverish seeking of pleasure and the flight from suffering are one and the same sickness. The Orthodox tradition can add the name of the Physician: not an abstract meaning, but a Face, the One who bore our pain and gave us to bear it together with Him. The meaning of suffering is not an explanation but a Presence: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” (Ps. 22:4 LXX).
“In everything give thanks.” (1 Thess. 5:18)
