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It has been called the problem of pain. It is the human experience of physical pain but also anguish, despair, misery, tragedy, sorrow; of all that brings some kind of suffering into this life. It is the way of the world,  a practical problem for everyone. But it is a logical problem for only a certain class of people, and for them it is a totally unsolvable problem, a mystery, an antinomy.

Pain and suffering is for all of us absolutely unavoidable, more or less, during our mortal life. We may be in agony most of our life, or we may have been free of physical pain but in deep emotional pain. We may have enjoyed a fairly tranquil life in all respects, or we may have been torn time and again. One way or another, everyone must endure some suffering.  

For those who believe there is not, as it is sometimes put, a higher power, there is no logical problem. Life is the way it is. Water goes downhill. People suffer. End of story.  But for those who do accept a ‘higher power’, there is a problem. Why does God permit—or cause—pain and suffering? Why, even, is there any discord and disorder at all in the universe? There seems to be no satisfactory answer in spite of millennia of philosophical and theological deliberation, and while William Blake  did not try to answer the unanswerable, perhaps no one put the question more forcefully than he did in his famous poem (1794), The Tyger.