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In a letter to his brother and sister, the poet John Keats wrote: “Call the world if you please ‘The vale of Soul-making’” (To George and Georgiana Keats, February 14, 1819, Keats, 1958, p. 102). Davies's timely book makes a similar point. Though we try our best to evade it, suffering, actively engaged, can become transformative. Davies goes beyond this to offer a critique of our culture's growing dread of emotional pain, and its strategies of avoidance and negation, implicating our profession in the project, to obscure and minimize the meaning that suffering can have.
I start with Keats, though, not just to suggest that Davies has important antecedents and allies but also to create an historical context for Davies's point. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, the West was being forced to reconsider its attitude towards suffering. Before the Enlightenment, the conventional view, adumbrated in Keats's phrase, was that the world was a “vale of tears.” Suffering was inevitable, but, properly understood, provided opportunities to prepare for death and salvation. The Enlightenment undermined that belief, making suffering and all forms of deprivation, no longer the will of God, requiring that we endure it with faith, but a set of problems demanding alleviation if not solution.