The Problem of Pain

“[Reason] also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another.”

Reason, Lewis argues, allows humans to anticipate pain, as well as death, but it also allows humans to inflict pain upon one another -- through crime, war, disease, and the creation of painful memories. Reason allows us to exercise our will in ways that contradict God’s wishes for us, and that, Lewis says, is the root of much of the pain we experience in life. As with all pain, the pain we inflict upon each other is soothed by the love of God.

“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?”

Lewis is laying the groundwork for his investigation into the origins of religious beliefs, and he’s also restating the problem of theodicy. From this question, he will build the case for Christian belief based on the numinous, morality, the awe-inducing presence of the divine, and the life of Jesus Christ, and then he’ll tackle the nature of suffering. Lewis will attempt to convince the reader that the “badness” in the world is made by humans, and the goodness of God is beyond that which we can even begin to comprehend.

“Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described.”

This statement summarizes Lewis’s argument for the existence of religious belief. The “catastrophic historical event” is the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the son of God who was sent by God to redeem us. The “spiritual preparation” is the awareness of the numinous, a moral code, and the awe-inspiring nature of the Creator, all of which, Lewis suggests, developed over time and allowed humankind to appreciate what the death of Jesus meant: the ultimate subjugation of personal will—in this case, Jesus’s—to the will of God.

“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.”

Lewis is anticipating and summarizing the primary argument against the rationale for pain that he will soon deliver. This argument sums up the issue of theodicy, which centers on the irreconcilability of a benevolent God and suffering humankind.

“The inexorable ‘laws of Nature’ which operate in defiance of human suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God. I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.”

The risk of free will is a recurring component of Lewis’s argument that a wholly good God and human suffering can coexist. Because we are free, we are free to choose goodness or evil. Thus, we are also free to experience a full range of the results of our actions, which includes pain.

“The permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head.”

While all things in nature are created by God, Lewis argues, what we do with those things is purely up to us. In exercising our free will and ingenuity, we may use things to do evil; this has nothing to do with God, who created the world for our benefit. We, not God, are responsible for how we choose to use things.

“But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void...”

Lewis is again anticipating the inevitable question: If God truly wants the best for us, why doesn’t God prohibit us from harming one another? The answer, Lewis argues, is that this would violate the freedom God granted us when God created us with a will of our own. There would be no point to such a world, as humans without free will are nothing more than automatons rather than reflections of the Creator who made them.

“Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards...”

One idea that has been suggested over the centuries is that our understanding of ‘goodness’ is so far off from God’s understanding of goodness that it is futile to even try to bridge the two, and thus, futile to attempt to live by the morality we ascribe to God. Lewis is refuting this argument, suggesting that God’s standards are a perfection of our own, but in no way do God’s standards exist in opposition to ours.

“We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’”

If God truly loves us, the argument goes, and wants our happiness, then why would God allow us to suffer or feel pain? Lewis is refuting this argument. In his view, God’s desire for our success involves sending pain as a corrective and instructional measure to shape and form us, not simply sitting back and gazing on us with fondness, which is the grandfatherly version of God—undemanding and uncomplicated —that Lewis believes so many people want.

“We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.”

This is an example of Lewis’s use of the motif of God as an artist, and like an artist, God will not rest until we have been made exactly as God wants us to be made. This is the primary reason God continues to send us pain: to form us, shape us, and perfect us into the people we were created to be.

“Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; his ‘feeling is more soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails.’ Of all powers he forgives most; but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”

Divine love, Lewis argues, is not a love that accepts all of our flaws and misdeeds without notice or care. Rather, God’s love for us is a love that sees us as we truly are and wants to help us overcome our deficits and remedy our shortcomings. Therefore, divine love is an interactive and demanding love. This is important to understanding Lewis’s belief that pain is the means by which God points out and corrects our behavior.

“We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased’. To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled, by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.”

In reiterating the nature of divine love, Lewis is explaining how it is that God’s concern for us allows us to suffer—pain, he argues, is the means by which we are improved. The point Lewis is making drives at the heart of theodicy, and why ‘bad things happen to good people.’ This becomes understandable, Lewis is saying, when we understand the true nature of divine love.

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell. But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.”

Having described God’s love to us, Lewis now says that whatever reaction we may have to that, even if our reaction is one of disbelief and rejection, is immaterial to God. His glory remains undiminished by our refusal to worship Him. If we were to truly comprehend God, then we would have the same reaction that Scripture tells us the people who encountered God had: we would fall on our faces in awe.

“I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact.”

An acute awareness of our shortcomings and failure to live in God’s example is necessary to understanding the role pain plays in bringing us closer to God. The more we are aware of our flaws, the easier it is to accept and learn from the pain in our lives.

“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; 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.”

In contemplating the doctrine of the Fall, a common question is why God, if God wants the best for us, didn’t simply eradicate Adam’s disobedience. Lewis’s response is that while God could have done this, it would only have been an exercise in futility, since, granted free will, humans would have chosen to sin continually.

“[T]he possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men. But there remains, none the less, much suffering which cannot thus be traced to ourselves.”

Humans, Lewis argues, account for the majority of pain we suffer. We cause ourselves pain, and we cause pain to each other. Yet, there remains pain that seems to have no human cause, and suffering that cannot be attributed to our own actions or the actions of others. This pain is the pain Lewis will attribute to God and explain as a corrective tool used by God on the creatures God made and loves.

“[P]ain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

Pain, Lewis says, is the most effective way to get our attention and redirect our focus back to God, where it belongs. This idea is the premise for most of the book.

“Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.”

Complete surrender of our will is what God requires, and what our souls actually wants, Lewis says. The soul’s ultimate goal is reunion with God, and the only way to achieve that is to allow God’s will to replace our own will. Only God’s will aims solely for the good; our human wills are too often directed towards false objectives, such as ego satisfaction, instant gratification, and vanity.

“If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse.”

Hell exists, In Lewis’s opinion, because we have the free will to refuse redemption. Because we are able to refuse to surrender ourselves to the will of God, we are also able to relegate ourselves to hell, or, as Lewis describes it, to ‘lose’ the game.

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity... To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man—to be an ex-man or “damned ghost”—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.”

Lewis describes the nature of the person condemned to hell: self-centered, and denying God’s will. The result is to lose humanity, to become an “ex-man” who pursues passions unrelated to God’s will and thus is forever separated from the company of other (better) humans.

“In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the rea-son) but of ourselves. This chapter is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me.”

This startling statement at the end of the chapter on hell is meant to give the reader pause. Lewis directs his commentary directly at the reader (and himself), letting there be no doubt that Lewis places himself alongside the reader in confronting the possibility of spending eternity in hell.

“For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction.”

Once again, as in the chapter on hell, Lewis breaks through the distance between author and audience to directly address the reader, reassuring the reader that he or she has the possibility of salvation and redemption. This statement, in the middle of the chapter on heaven, effectively pulls the reader into the statement Lewis is making, forcing the reader to reckon with Lewis’s proposal, and form an opinion of what he is saying.

“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”

This is the choice that lies before each reader, according to Lewis: acceptance of God’s will or assertion of the self, attainment of the ultimate prize or loss of everything that matters, heaven or hell.