31 pages • 1 hour read
C. S. LewisThe Problem of Pain
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1940A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Original Sin
Christian doctrine teaches that the first sin committed is recounted in the biblical book of Genesis, when Adam is placed in the Garden of Eden and given both animal companions and a human helpmate, Eve. Adam, who has free will, is instructed not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but, tempted by Satan (in the form of a serpent) who misdirects Eve, Adam eats this fruit. In doing so, Adam disobeys God and is banished (along with Eve) from the Garden of Eden. This sin of disobedience and willfulness is passed down from Adam and Eve to each of us, meaning that all humans are forever seeking to be restored to God, and to the state of innocence that existed in Eden. This is the story of the Fall, when humans “fell” from grace and good standing with God.
Lewis returns repeatedly to the story of the Fall, the doctrine that resulted from it, and the symbolic separation between man and God that resulted from Adam’s exercise of free will. Lewis sees pain as a means of being restored to the pre-Fall state, when humans had not yet placed themselves above the will of God.
A Child’s Circle
In Chapter 3, “Divine Goodness,” Lewis attempts to explain the nature of God’s divinity. Because we are so far from God’s omniscient, omnipotent goodness, Lewis believes, we cannot comprehend the nature of God but through symbols and motifs. In explaining the gap between who we are and who God is, Lewis writes, “Divine ‘goodness’ […] it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning” (20).
In Lewis’s view, God is not “other” than us. God’s nature is not opposite ours, as white is the opposite of black. Rather, God is the perfect state of our being; us, but without flaws. Therefore, we can relate to God and understand what God wants from us because God is like us, but at the same time, God is the perfected and all-powerful, all-knowing version of us, so that if we were to encounter God, we would understand at once that God is the ultimate version of us, and the standard of what we should have been striving for all along.
God the Artist
In an attempt to help us understand the depth and breadth of God’s love for us, Lewis uses the motif of an artist and the artist’s creations. In Chapter 3, “Divine Goodness,” he writes, “God’s relation to man is pictured thus in Jeremiah’s vision of the potter and the clay, or when St. Peter speaks of the whole Church as a building on which God is at work, and of the individual members as stones [...] 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” (22).
The “certain character” that God is trying to attain with each of us is a state of perfection in which we have subjugated our free will to God’s will and been redeemed, restored, and reunited with God. Pain, according to Lewis, is the tool that shapes the clay or smooths the stones. Pain is the means by which God the artist perfects the art.
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