The Cosmic Ocean. Paul K. Chappell
Roman poet Virgil in the first century BC. Thirteen hundred years later, Virgil’s poetic vision was in Dante’s mind when he wrote his Inferno, although by then Tartarus had been subsumed into Christian notions of hell.13
In the Odyssey, written by the Greek poet Homer nearly three thousand years ago, the warrior Odysseus sees Sisyphus in Tartarus. Homer’s description of Sisyphus gives us important insights into the human condition:
And I saw Sisyphus too, bound to his own torture, grappling his monstrous boulder with both arms working, heaving, hands struggling, legs driving, he kept on thrusting the rock uphill toward the brink, but just as it teetered, set to topple over—time and again the immense weight of the thing would wheel it back and the ruthless boulder would bound and tumble down to the plain again—so once again he would heave, would struggle to thrust it up, sweat drenching his body, dust swirling above his head.14
Greek mythology is filled with brilliant metaphors, and the punishments in Tartarus reveal that the Greeks knew some important truths about psychology and the human condition. They knew that torture could consist not only of extreme pain inflicted on the body, but also the loss of all purpose and meaning. Sisyphus experiences hell not because of the strain he feels from pushing the heavy boulder uphill, but the sense of futility he feels when the boulder refuses to go over the top of the hill, rolling back downhill despite his best efforts. His repetitive actions serve no purpose. They have no meaning, and all of his work seems in vain. Imagine struggling with every ounce of your strength to push a boulder uphill, only to see it roll back downhill, and repeating this meaningless cycle for eternity. You would go insane.
Victor Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, realized that finding purpose and meaning is important not only for our sanity, but also our survival. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner described Frankl’s contribution to our understanding of the human condition:
Frankl approvingly quotes the words of Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” He describes poignantly those prisoners [in Auschwitz] who gave up on life, who had lost all hope for a future and were inevitably the first to die. They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for. By contrast, Frankl kept himself alive and kept hope alive by summoning up thoughts of his wife and the prospect of seeing her again, and by dreaming at one point of lecturing after the war about the psychological lessons to be learned from the Auschwitz experience. Clearly, many prisoners who desperately wanted to live did die, some from disease, some in the crematoria. But Frankl’s concern is less with the question of why most died than it is with the question of why anyone at all survived.
Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it …
My own congregational experience has shown me the truth of Frankl’s insights. I have known successful businessmen who, upon retirement, lost all zest for life. Their work had given their lives meaning. Often it was the only thing that had given their lives meaning and, without it, they spent day after day sitting at home, depressed, “with nothing to do.” I have known people who rose to the challenge of enduring the most terrible afflictions and situations as long as they believed there was a point to their suffering … Having a Why to live for enabled them to bear the How.15
Discussing his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz, Frankl explained how prisoners who found purpose and meaning in the midst of suffering were better able to endure the tremendous hardship of the concentration camp:
Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” could be the guiding motto … regarding prisoners. Whenever there was an opportunity for it, one had to give them a why—an aim—for their lives, in order to strengthen them to bear the terrible how of their existence. Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost.16
When suffering has no purpose and meaning (which is symbolized by the psychological torture of Sisyphus in Tartarus), it feels like a senseless hell. But when we find meaning in our suffering, we can “bear the cross” with courage and dignity. Christian philosophy teaches that suffering becomes redemptive when it serves a high moral purpose. This is symbolized by Jesus, whom many Christians believe was able to carry the cross despite its heavy weight, because he knew his suffering was for the benefit of humanity.
Gandhi applied this to leadership by giving people a purpose for their suffering. In The Art of Waging Peace, I explain how Gandhi was more strategically brilliant and innovative than any general I have ever studied. In his struggle against colonialism, he used nonviolent tactics such as protests, boycotts, and “going to prison for a just cause” to undermine the authority of the British Empire—the most powerful empire in the world.
Throughout human history, people have dreaded going to prison. Because Gandhi had an ingenious understanding of the human condition, however, he realized people will voluntarily suffer if they know it serves an important purpose. How incredible was Gandhi’s leadership ability? He was the first leader in history who motivated tens of thousands of people to want to go to prison. Gandhi did not even pay these people. Unlike presidents and generals, Gandhi had no official authority, instead having to rely on his moral authority.
Gandhi motivated people to voluntarily suffer for a cause by first leading by example (he spent many years in prison himself), and by giving them a noble purpose they felt strongly about. Gandhi scholar Michael Nojeim describes how Gandhi’s understanding of the human condition allowed him to transform prison from something people dreaded into something they desired:
Ordinarily, going to jail was supposed to be a shameful, peril-riddled experience that no self-respecting Hindu, and surely not one from Gandhi’s social status, could ever imagine or countenance. But Gandhi changed all that because he was able to convince other Indians that going to jail while fighting for a just cause could be a point of honor and even prestige. He made going to jail “the hallmark of integrity and national commitment rather than an experience of degradation and public shame” (Brown, 1989, 117). Moreover, Indians having served time in jail for taking principled, nonviolent stances often increased their political stock among their nationalist brethren, which added to their qualifications to become high-ranking members of the Indian Congress Party …
Gandhi’s repeated incarcerations in South Africa (in 1908, 1909, and 1913) for conducting civil disobedience campaigns provided an excellent training ground for other reasons. He learned to court and face prison sentences with pride and resilience and for the sake of conscience.17
Describing how Gandhi’s leadership transformed perceptions in Indian society, Narayan Desai discusses how he reacted when his father—who served as Gandhi’s secretary—was arrested by the police:
A batch of policemen came to arrest my father, and some of us young children were following the police van and instead of saying “Bye bye papa” or something like that, I was telling him, “Papa, this time no less than two years,” which means I want you to be in prison for no less than two years. You see, it was a [source of] pride to have your father sentenced for two years and not for three months or so. So Gandhi’s idea is what had touched even the children in that atmosphere.18
Applying Gandhi’s tactics and understanding of the human condition to the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. gave many people a high sense of purpose and meaning that motivated them to confront physical danger,