From Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford, 1985), which is a fascinating book for those of you who might be interested.
The invented god and its human inventor (or, in the inverted language of the scriptures, the creature and his creature) are differentiated by the immunity of the one and the woundability of the other; and if the creature is not merely woundable but already deeply and permanently wounded, handicapped or physically marred in some way (Leviticus 21:16; 22:21; Deuteronomy 17:1), then that individual is asserted to exist at an ever greater moral distance from God than does the “normal” person. (183)
Not only does this make me think about Richard III in terms of Richard's "distance" from divinity and about Edward II in terms of the final murder as an act of removing Edward's divinity through pain (because what is pain if not fundamentally human), but about Milton and Paradise Lost.
Several years ago I wrote a paper on Satan's wounds as indicative not only of his Hobbesean understanding of the universe, but as the physical manifestation of his sundering from god and divinity. In Paradise Lost - as, amusingly enough, in the movie Constantine (2005) when Gabriel becomes "mortal" - pain is the marker of the Fall. This has all sorts of implications in my own creative work in terms of scarring, marking, and pain, but that's another (very long) story.
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