The Problem of Pain

by C.S. Lewis

But creatures are not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for.

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.

But God wills our good, and our good is to love Him

and to love Him we must know Him:

God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.

Now why do we men need so much alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to become very bad

We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.

We are deceived by looking on the outside of things.

How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.

I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words.

when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

In the developed doctrine, then, it is claimed that Man, as God made him, was completely good and completely happy, but that he disobeyed God and became what we now see.

No animal has moral virtue: but it is not true that all animal behaviour is of the kind one should call ‘wicked’ if it were practised by men.

The equal crudity of artefacts here tells you nothing about the intelligence or virtue of the makers.

To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture.

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.

From Christianity itself we learn that there is a level—in the long run the only level of importance—on which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all over the simple and the child.

As a young man wants a regular allowance from his father which he can count on as his own, within which he makes his own plans (and rightly, for his father is after all a fellow creature), so they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to plan for pleasure and for security, to have a meum from which, no doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time, attention, and love, but which, nevertheless, was theirs not His.

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.

For all I can see, it might have concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no consequence.

It is a sin possible even to Paradisal man, because the mere existence of a self—the mere fact that we call it ‘me’—includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry.

He had, therefore, no temptation (in our sense) to choose the self

I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to continue to rule the organism through the human spirit when the human spirit was in revolt against Him.

At any rate He did not. He began to rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but by those of nature.4 Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and suffered whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of pain, senility and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. And the will, caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it.

What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature. ‘Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’

It had turned from God and become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God,5 it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward.

God planning and creating the world process for good and of that good being frustrated by the free will of the creatures.

we do not really know what we are talking about.

I think the most significant way of stating the real freedom of man is to say that if there are other rational species than man, existing in some other part of the actual universe, then it is not necessary to suppose that they also have fallen.

‘as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive’.

possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet.

When souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of men.

whether physical or mental, which the patient dislikes.

Pain in the B sense, in fact, is synonymous with ‘suffering’, ‘anguish’, ‘tribulation’, ‘adversity’, or ‘trouble’, and it is about it that the problem of pain arises.

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.

A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer.

if I do not deserve it?

unless (once more) I deserve

hence, too, such natural expressions as ‘I wonder how he’d like it if the same thing were done to him’ or ‘I’ll teach him’.

Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion.

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.

Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us. We ‘have all we want’ is a terrible saying when ‘all’ does not include God. We find God an interruption.

As St Augustine says somewhere, ‘God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.’

‘We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; its there for emergencies but he hopes h...

Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts.

If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?

Now Paradisal man always chose to follow God’s will.

The question ‘Am I doing this for God’s sake or only because I happen to like it?’