Jody (who comes from the libertarian theology tradition) wrote:
>Certainly, suffering is a main theme of Christianity. But suffering in
>Christianity is not done for the sadistic enjoyment of anyone else. Suffering
>alone does not make S/M. At least, your explanation above does not make that
>crucial connection. Is there more?
The sadistic enjoyment of the suffering of others was quite a prominent theme in early Christianity. Here's Tertullian, one of the church fathers, in "De Spectaculis":
*** Yes, and there are other sights: that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues... when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? what my derision? Which sight gives me joy? which rouses me to exultation? -- as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world's wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in ought that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder-voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more "dissolute" in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows; unless even then I shall not care to attend to such ministers of sin, in my eager wish rather to fix a gaze insatiable on those whose fury vented itself against the Lord. ***
It was a common belief among early Christians that part of the pleasure of being in heaven was enjoying watching the suffering of the damned. And Leszek Kolakowski points out in his book on Jansenism ("God Owes Us Nothing", pp.83-4) that since it was generally reckoned that unbaptised babies went straight to hell, then a part of the joy that parents felt in heaven was to "jubilate on seeing their offspring devoured by everlasting flames". No early Christian or later Augustinian author mentions this specifically, but it's an obvious inference from the doctrines they did hold, and it certainly gives pause for thought.
Chris