The Problem of Pain

by C.S. Lewis

Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said.

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.

We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses—that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less.

Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere ‘kindness’ which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love.

The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. 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 their failure.

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. If the miracles ceased, then sooner or later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did not, then a world thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever depended on human choice,

The whole modern estimate of primitive man is based upon that idolatry of artefacts

because the mere existence of a self—the mere fact that we call it ‘me’—includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry.

That may be the reason why the first of the ten commandments is: Thou shall have no others gods but Me.

Thus human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger in its own house, or even a prisoner;

In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.

the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—

But to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years of usurpation is a kind of death.

And if, now that we are grown up, we do not howl and stamp quite so much, that is partly because our elders began the process of breaking or killing our self-will in the nursery, and partly because the same passions now take more subtle forms and have grown clever at avoiding death by various ‘compensations’.

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;

But 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.

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.

Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.

but to contend that I am learning to surrender myself by doing what is so attractive to me would be ridiculous.

Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s,

Whatever good effects these experiences have are dependent upon the centre; so that even if pain itself was of no spiritual value, yet, if fear and pity were, pain would have to exist in order that there should be something to be feared and pitied.

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.

Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death if such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not.

I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistaken for the elixir of life.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast.

after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an ‘undoing’ is required.

Pain requires no such undoing.

to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost souls is ‘their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves’.

Another objection turns on the apparent disproportion between eternal damnation and transitory sin.

In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: ‘What are you asking God to do?’ To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

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 reason) but of ourselves. This chapter is not about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you and me.

Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock.

But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.

The desire—much more the satisfaction—has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire itself leads us to anticipate.

What can be more a man’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him?

self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self,