For nobody knows what transpires between a soul and their maker, at the hour of death, except for that soul. And nobody knows what the sorrows of a particular heart look like.
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Even if what we know of a person’s end, as in the case of Lady Macbeth, would seem to produce a theological quandary for those who would not regard, as a foregone conclusion, that soul’s journey to perdition.
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Which isn’t to say that the mysteries of repentance and salvation are entirely knowable, for that isn’t the case, but that they are not so unknowable that we cannot exclude from them certain traits or conditions that would make a contradiction of God.
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And, secondly, because to free ourselves from the habits of sin to which we’ve become attached is, by necessity, painful, and not unlike what the experience of withdrawal might be, to an addict.
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For the torments of one’s conscience, when that conscience is functioning as it should be (with a vigilance that is proportionate to the moral responsibilities that belong to a person in a given situation) are not what they are because of anything like a gratuitousness on the part of a deity who, having instilled that conscience in us, would like to see us suffer. Or because some calculus in the spiritual realm demands it, arbitrarily. But because, first of all, sin has its wages, just like virtue, existing as it does within the divine economy from which everything takes its substance, and in which everything participates. So that it will always produce a debt that will be owed, and paid, by the person who willed it and initiated it — for that is a law, spiritually speaking, in the same way that, in physics, there is the law of conservation of energy (it is sustained not by a whim, or a caprice, or anything so personal or mutable, but by a principle that undergirds reality).
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And yet…and yet…who is to say that the divine did not finally do its work on her? And, through the torments of her somnambulisms, bring her, by painful dispensation, nearer to the thresholds of purgatory and heaven, than to those of hell?
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How rightly said the doctor, of her: “Unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Infected minds to their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets. More needs she the divine than the physician.”
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For she is such a one who, acting as though the conscience were a made-up notion, unworthy of a woman like herself, is felled by her conscience, the way a pine is felled by the axe.
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Or, better, Lady Macbeth, washing ‘blood’ from her hands, even in sleep.
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Or Hamlet, pacing a courtyard in Elsinore.
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Think of Raskolnikov, alone in his garret at the top of the stairs.
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For when the spirit is not recollected to itself, all other aspects of the person fall out of sync with themselves and with each other.
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And, anyway, perhaps the disruption I am trying to describe is spiritual more than emotional, though one’s emotions are of course connected to one’s spirit, and will be affected by it the same way that waves on the surface of the ocean will be troubled by the shifting of tectonic plates below.
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Though I should also say that a conscience can malfunction in the other direction, by which I mean that it is also susceptible to the caprices of a person who would wield it against themself too fiercely, or with an intensity that is exaggerated, from either a disordered sense of morality, or a need for approval that manifests as an exhibition of piety.
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Which in fact can be a sign of a healthy conscience, by which I mean a conscience that is functioning according to its design, and is ordered toward a person’s conduct in such a way that it awakens, or makes itself felt, whenever that conduct falls short of the standards that are native to it, and that cannot be altered without disfiguring the personality, and undermining the soul’s capacity for joy.
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And so the extent to which a person will feel a disturbance of equilibrium, in their psyche, when otherwise their psyche could be at rest, while in some cases will be evidence of a harm that has been done to them, at other times will be a measure of the unwillingness of their conscience to leave them in peace, which would indicate an absence of resolution, or conciliation, in those areas of the person’s life that are in something like moral disarray.
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Meaning, I guess, that conscience is the mechanism by which we can recognize the traumas we have inflicted, regardless of whether we have also been subjected to them, by somebody or something else.
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Although this last situation will occur only if the individual in question (the one who is doing the harm) is alive to the promptings of their conscience.
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And, anyway, trauma will differ from ‘emotional karma’ (as I have so inexactly referred to the condition I was describing) in that the former is the experience of an individual who has been subjected to harm, while the latter can result from that same experience, but can also result from instances where the individual subjects someone or something else to harm.
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Not that the reality of a trauma depends on who is defining it as such, but that if the term has been overused (and maybe it has not been) it will undergo the enervating effect that obtains to any word whose associations are intended to be felt by the heart, before its meaning can be registered by the brain.