ABSTRACT
In the domain of suffering, affliction is a thing apart, specific, and irreducible. It is altogether different than simple suffering. It takes hold of the soul and marks it to its very core with a mark that belongs to it alone, the mark of slavery. Slavery such as was practiced in Ancient Rome is only the extreme form of affliction. The ancients, who were well acquainted with the matter, used to say, “A man loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.” Affliction is an uprooting of life, a varyingly attenuated simulacrum of death, made irresistibly present to the soul by the immediate touch or dread of physical pain. If physical pain is completely absent, there is no affliction for the soul, because thought makes for some other object. There is no true affliction unless the circumstances that have seized a life and uprooted it touch it directly or indirectly in all its parts, social, psychological and physical.
