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.

Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, ‘Why do you not believe in God?’

It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another.

All stories will come to nothing:

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?

I am not primarily arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origin—a task, in my view, necessary if we are to put the problem of pain in its right setting.

Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period, began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits.

All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’.

Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience. And it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored.

In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.

If, on such grounds, or on better ones, we follow the course on which humanity has been led, and become Christians, we then have the ‘problem’ of pain.

Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence 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.’ This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.

And we are told in Scripture that ‘with God all things are possible’.

In ordinary usage the word impossible generally implies a suppressed clause beginning with the word unless.

But I know very well that if it is self-contradictory it is absolutely impossible.

It has no unless clause attached to it. It is impossible under all conditions and in all worlds and for all agents.

nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

We may thus come to think things possible which are really impossible, and vice versa.

Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between.

and space and time are already an environment. But more than this is required.

I can talk to you because we can both set up sound-waves in the common air between us. 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: and hence I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance.

that you could make your presence known to me—all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you.

No one minds the process ‘warm—beautifully hot—too hot—it stings’ which warns him to withdraw his hand from exposure to the fire:

If a man travelling in one direction is having a journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up hill.

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.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound-waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them.

That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.

In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature.

You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position ...

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.

‘It would be better for me not to exist’—in what sense ‘for me’? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing?

Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and that suffering without contradiction.

if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

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.

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

our very power to think is His power communicated to us.

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.

The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.

Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved;

the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes.

God does not exist for the sake of man.

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.

What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

We call human love selfish when it satisfies its own needs at the expense of the object’s needs—

God has no needs.

In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.

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

It is good for us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object,

Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: