The Problem of Pain

by C.S. Lewis

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.

It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them.

God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good.

A familiar example is Abraham’s ‘trial’ when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious question, ‘If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture?’ But as St Augustine points out,5 whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know that his obedience could endure such a command until the event taught him: and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham ‘would obey’ was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment.

Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it.

The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity. Nature herself has written it large across the world in the repeated drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn.

the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of wisdom is ‘a practice of death’.

I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means.

if fear and pity were, pain would have to exist in order that there should be something to be feared and pitied. And that fear and pity help us in our return to obedience and charity is not to be doubted. Everyone has experienced the effect of pity in making it easier for us to love the unlovely—that is, to love men not because they are in any way naturally agreeable to us but because they are our brethren.

we must be careful to attend to what we know and not to what we imagine.

About human pain we know, about animal pain we only speculate.

What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads.

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.

Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty.

In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects.

‘What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,’

The kind and degree of obedience which a creature owes to its Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever.

The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. 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.

We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeti...

When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe.

If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.

If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may refuse.

And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell.

We were then discussing pain which might still lead to repentance.

Supposing he will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for him?

To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

Von Hügel here warns us not to confuse the doctrine itself with the imagery by which it may be conveyed.

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?’

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.

To find out what is natural, we must study specimens which retain their nature and not those which have been corrupted.

but because it is outside the range of our knowledge.

But we must not become the victims of our metaphor.

Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity.

The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of man.

Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.

if God has not caused it, He has permitted it, and, once again, what shall be done for these innocents?

‘Where will you put all the mosquitoes?’—a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to the worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.

The error we must avoid is that of considering them in themselves. Man is to be understood only in his relation to God. The beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God.

Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right.

Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master.

And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.

We are very shy nowadays of even mentioning heaven.

Again, we are afraid that heaven is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested.

Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique.

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

The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold.

‘in heaven there is no ownership.

Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency.