The Life & Legacy of C. S. Lewis #6
“The Problem of Pain”
Romans 8.18-28
I’ve always been intrigued by the opening lines of books. (There is Charles Dickens’ “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Rick Warren begins The Purpose-Friven Life with “It’s not about you.” M. Scott Peck swets out on The Road Less Traveled with “Life is difficult.”) Lewis launches The Problem of Pain with these memorable words: “Not many years ago when I was an atheist…”
One of the reasons C. S. Lewis was so uniquely qualified to write about the Christian faith was the fact that he had, as a young man, totally rejected it. He had regarded Christianity as “one mythology of many” and in an early poem had dismissed the idea of “a just God that cares for earthly pain” as nothing more than a “dream”. (1) So when publisher Ashley Sampson asked him to contribute a volume on the problem of pain to his Christian Challenge series, Lewis was able to bring to the book not only the faith he’d come to embrace, but the questions that had once troubled him so deeply.
There are hints that Lewis was a bit reluctant to write The Problem of Pain or, at least, that he approached the task modestly. “The only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering,” he writes in the preface. “For the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified…” Reluctant to publish the book under his own name, he characterized it as “the work of a layman and an amateur.” In fact, it is a brilliant book, typical Lewis, deep and clear as a mountain lake, completely original and yet faithful to biblical and church tradition. I would love to have been at one of the meetings of the Inklings when Tolkien read from The Hobbit while Lewis shared The Problem of Pain, when both were works in progress.
In his introduction Lewis describes the pessimistic worldview he embraced when he was an atheist. “Creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die… History is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror… The race is doomed…” You get the picture. (He sounds more like Woody Allen than C. S. Lewis!) But, he notes, “I never noticed that the very strength of the pessimists’ case at once poses a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator?” (2) He goes on to describe the origin of religion, which has three strands, to which the Christian faith adds a fourth.
First, there is our “experience of the Numinous” (a kind of holy awe or fear). Second, there is an acknowledgement of a universal standard of morality which we all fail to practice. (In The Abolition of Man Lewis refers to this as the Tao and gives extensive examples of its universal nature in the appendix. He likewise begins Mere Christianity with a memorable discussion of this universal standard we all acknowledge but fail to practice.) Third, there is a combining of those two (we believe in a God who is both holy and good and the combination seems natural enough to us but, Lewis reminds us, there are non-moral religions and non-religious moralities). The fourth element is an historical event, the birth of Jesus Christ who claimed to be one with the God who is both good and holy, and either he was a lunatic or he was and is what he said. Interestingly, Lewis says that belief in a good and holy God “in a sense… creates, rather than solves the problem of pain…” (3)
In the chapter Divine Omnipotence Lewis states the problem: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form." (4) So what gives? Lewis helps us see what omnipotence really means, particularly in light of the fact that the omnipotent God we believe in and worship used His omnipotence to create us with free will. God’s Omnipotence, Lewis writes, “means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say ’God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it’, you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ’God can’. …It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God." (5)
God chose to create a world in which we have free will. This fact has a number of implications that help explain the existence of pain and evil. First, in creating us with free will God, in a sense, voluntarily surrendered his ability to control everything. Second, we can use our free will foolishly; that creates pain. Third, a world of free souls requires a world in which there is a relatively independent Nature. This is not necessarily, as Leibniz said, the best of all possible worlds but maybe the only possible kind of world God could have created given our free will. "We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as a blade of grass when wielded as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void…" (6)
Lewis then turns his attention to the idea of Divine Goodness and notes that by goodness God means love, while most of us think of goodness as mere kindness. In His love for us, God is not always what we would call kind. Like a parent who out of love takes his or her children to the doctor for a shot, God intends to give us what we need, not what we want or think we need. The reason our perspective so often differs from God’s is explored in the chapter on Human Wickedness, in which Lewis argues that we need to properly diagnose our problem before we can understand why and how God treats us as He is. In order to understand our true situation, we need to recover a sense of sin.
Most of us fight against that and most of us use the same tools to do so. Examples: (1st) We try to convince ourselves that our habitual vices are exceptional single acts, while our occasional virtuous acts are habitual– “like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal”. (7) (2nd) We harbor the strange illusion that time cancels sin, as opposed to the biblical view that it is only through repentance and the sacrifice of Christ. (3rd) Everybody’s doing it and that means it must be normal and since its normal it must be not just excusable but good. (4th) We use theological language and call any talk of sin “an excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity.” But, as Lewis points out, while God may be more than moral goodness, He is certainly not less. “The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of that failure.” (8) (5th) Citing James 1.13, (“Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God.’) Lewis insists that we take responsibility for our moral choices and not shift the blame to some situation or set of circumstances beyond our control.
All of this goes back to the issue of choice, the misuse of our free will. Lewis explores this in his chapter on The Fall of Man. "Christianity asserts that God is good,” Lewis writes, “that he made all things good and for the sake of their goodness; that one of the good things He made, namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included the possibility of evil; and that creatures, availing themselves of this possibility, have become evil." (9) Lewis poses an intriguing what if? What if God had simply intervened and undone the results of Adam and Eve’s first sin? "It would. no doubt, have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first sin ever committed by a human being,” Lewis writes, “but this would not have been much good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and of the third, and so on forever… a world thus continually under-propped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice…" (10)Behind every individual sin we commit is the sin of pride. “It is the fall in every individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.” (11)
In the chapters on Human Pain, Lewis explores how God, in His love (which unlike mere kindness is all about what we need, not just what we would like) helps free us from pride’s self-deception and self-destruction. "The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less the victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain [on the other hand] is unmasked, unmistakable evil." (12) God can use pain to show us our real situation. Lewis points out three good results that can come from physical pain. (1st) In one of the most memorable passages in the book he writes, "Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world." (13) (2nd) Pain shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency. Recognizing this is a tough teaching, Lewis asks, "How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said?" (3rd) Surrendering ourselves to God will involve pain. One of the way we know that we are beginning to loose our grip on self-deceptive, self-destructive pride is that it isn’t easy. But, Lewis reminds us of something Aristotle said, “that the more virtuous a men becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.” (14) Put another way, the more Christ-like we become, the more Christ-like actions will seem “natural”.
Of course Lewis understood that while pain can have good results, people who are actually suffering or grieving find it hard to be encouraged by this fact. And so he writes, "All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the author. You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward. But what is that to this purpose? If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it… I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ’perfect through suffering’ is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design." (15)
Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940. Twenty years later he was grieving the loss of his beloved wife Joy. Finding four notebooks he decided to keep a journal of his thoughts and feelings. Lewis published these journals pseudonymously as A Grief Observed. It is a brief, painfully honest document that explores how the experience of grief impacted Lewis and traces his difficult journey toward hope and faith. Taking a very different approach to the problem of pain– it is far more personal and far less theoretical– it is a work which has nonetheless given much comfort to a great many people.
Returning to The Problem of Pain, Lewis insists that suffering is not good in itself, but a tool God can use for His good purposes. He notes that suffering will not cease until the world is either redeemed or is no longer redeemable. He also points out how the Christian doctrine of suffering helps explain a curious fact about our world, that God withholds “the settled happiness and security which we all desire” but still fills our lives with many moments of joy and pleasure. “Our Father refreshed us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” (16)
Following a thought-provoking chapter on Hell (which we explored in last week’s message on The Great Divorce) and a fascinating chapter on Animal Pain, Lewis turns our attention to our heart’s true home, Heaven, beginning with the words of Paul: “I reckon l that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed in us.” “There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven,” Lewis writes, “but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.” (17)
I think he’s right. These are the Shadowlands. One day, because of the self-giving love of Jesus Christ, the sufferings of this present world will be a thing of the past, and we will find ourselves in the place that He has prepared for us, our heart’s true home. In the meantime, we have the consolations of Jesus Christ, the ever-present help of the Holy Spirit, the comfort of our church home, and wised guides like C. S. Lewis to help us on our way.
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Endnotes
(1) Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis, A Complete Guide to His Writings, (Harper: San Francisco), p. 293
(2) C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (Harper: San Francisco), pp.2-3.
(3) Lewis, Ibid., p. 14.
(4) Lewis, Ibid., p. 16.
(5) Lewis, Ibid., p. 18
(6) Lewis, Ibid., p. 24
(7) Lewis., Ibid., p. 53.
(8) Lewis, Ibid., pp. 59-60
(9) Lewis, Ibid., p. 63.
(10) Lewis, Ibid., p. 65
(11) Lewis, Ibid., p. 70.
(12) Lewis, Ibid., p. 90.
(13) Lewis, Ibid., p. 91.
(14) Lewis, Ibid., p. 98.
(15) Lewis, Ibid., pp. 104-105.
(16) Lewis, Ibid., p 116.
(17) Lewis, Ibid., p. 149.
