The Problem of Pain

by C.S. Lewis

when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science.

Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.

“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.

Matter, which keeps souls apart, also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an “outside” as well as an “inside”, so that what are acts of will and thought for you are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only to be, but to appear:

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.

What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy.

Love is something more stem and splendid than mere kindness:

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness.

He makes, we are made: He is original, we derivative.

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.”14 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”.

If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.

We think we are kind when we are only happy:

And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably angry.

But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.

But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.

Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible.

“if you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.”3

No; depend upon it, when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.

On the contrary, not all animals treat other creatures of their own species as badly as men treat men.

From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.

We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of “our own” pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be “our own”.

They wanted, as we say, to “call their souls their own”. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own.

Hence the necessity to die daily: however often we think we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive.

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 their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.

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.

No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.

We “have all we want” is a terrible saying when “all” does not include God. We find God an interruption.

“God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.”

Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up “our own” when it is no longer worth keeping.

If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is “nothing better” now to be had.

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell:

to choose involves knowing that you choose.

If the thing we like doing is, in fact, the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it remains a mere happy coincidence.

To say that God “need not have tried the experiment” is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist.

And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

so much mercy, yet still there is Hell.

The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving.

the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all.5 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.

that evil comes from the abuse of free-will.

“that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us.”

Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.