The Problem of Pain

Clive Staples Lewis was a British scholar and author who lived from 1898 to 1963. Born in Belfast, Ireland, Lewis served in the British Army during World War I before joining the faculty of Magdalen College at Oxford, where he eventually became a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature. He later left for Cambridge University, where he assumed the post of Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1954.

Raised a Christian, Lewis abandoned his beliefs in 1911, only to experience what he termed a “conversion” as a university student. His journey from atheism back to Christianity was a common topic of Lewis’s writings, the earliest of which were published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Lewis belonged to the Church of England and is known as an Anglican author. Despite never training as a theologian, Lewis did receive an honorary Doctor of Divinity from the University of St. Andrew’s in 1946.

C. S. Lewis authored over 30 books and became one of the best-known and most widely read Christian writers in the world. His most well-known books are The Screwtape Letters (1942), Mere Christianity (1952), and the Chronicles of Narnia series (1950-1956). One of the chief reasons C. S. Lewis’s work was so widely read is that he employed a very conversational, confessional tone with his readers. He establishes a rapport with his reader, earning both the reader’s trust and the reader’s willingness to hear his arguments, by being disarmingly frank about his own shortcomings and doubts. In The Problem of Pain, for instance, Lewis frequently reminds the reader that he is no theologian, but what’s even more effective is his when he writes in Chapter 3, “When I came first to the University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music” (19).

This moment of self-deprecation stands in particular contrast to both the weighty subject matter of the book and the tradition of theological writing, which is known for an authoritative, scholarly approach and very dry authorial voice. Yet Lewis actively disrupts the authority his work possesses by reminding readers of his own intellectual shortcomings, doubts, uncertainty, and prior ignorance. Far from making his work less effective, though, Lewis’s approach, which was uncommon at the time, made his books even more accessible and popular with readers. As a result, C. S. Lewis occupies a particular position in the western canon as a very readable and influential theologian.