The Problem of Pain

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Religion & Spirituality
Author:	C.S. Lewis 1940, Reprinted 2001

Seeing the human follies of war, greed and over exploitation of finite global resources, one book has been on my mind lately. I ask your indulgence to revise a review I wrote for "The Problem of Pain" last year on "Yahoo 360" now that its contents--edited a bit--seem more relevant. Lewis, better known as the creator of "The Narnia Chronicles", was a superb and concise prose writer, and a true "apostle to the skeptics" and this is one of his best works.

Critics of Christianity have had their field days going off on how a loving Deity could create a world where such things as pain and suffering exist. " The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike," Jesus pointed out, but what of the people who suffer from pain for no good reason such as genetic illness or being in the pathway of an evil person who wanted to rob or hurt someone?

There is also the question of hell. (Or Hell, don't know if I should capitalize the first letter of that place or not.) Some leaders in the church don't accept the idea that there is a place like hell. Given the popular conceptions of "everlasting fire" and what Dante's first volume of "The Divine Comedy " did for fleshing out the images he associated with the Underworld, and the graphic torments his enemies suffered, I can hardly blame any cleric for not playing that up at the Sunday Morning sermon.

Other Christians fully embrace the concept of Hell, but feel the place will be reserved for folks whose political and social mores do not match their own. Some are so certain about it they put bumper stickers on their vehicles saying "Eternal Life: Smoking or Non-Smoking" or "Those Who Live Like There's No Hell Better Be Right". That seems too smug to me--are such people casually condemning others to the "outer darkness" just because they are riding their car's bumper? The smuggest bumper sticker I've seen is the one that says "In Case of The Rapture, This Vehicle Will Be Unoccupied". Hmmm. Are these people talking to the Angels or do they think their presumed high status within a particular church congregation will give them a "All-Access" ticket if the world comes to an end?

To me, it's one thing to have faith, "the substance of the thing hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). It's quite another to figure you got a pass, or , even if you are somehow certain of it, that you should brag about it. Christianity has its many critics and some of them are so because we forget that pride of place is something Jesus refused to give even to his own disciples, as the special request of the brothers James and John to Jesus illustrates (Mark 10:35-40).

One of the best and most direct discussions of why injustice and pain exists in the world came from the great lay Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis, in the book "The Problem of Pain" (1940, reprinted 2001 by Harper Collins Books). It is only one of many books about Faith that Professor Lewis wrote about, and it is to me the most challenging.




"On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgment 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. On the other hand, if God's moral judgment differs from ours so that our `black' may be His `white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good".

--C S Lewis, from "The Problem of Pain"

Christianity presumes a loving Creator-God. To Lewis, such a God must be willing to grant humans free will. This is fraught with the potential for great love and great abuse. Lewis takes Augustine's notion of the Fall of Man seriously, but he puts it in a context that includes an Evolutionary path. (Lewis is no fundamentalist, although many of that ilk might like to pretend so because of his popularity from The Narnia Chronicles.)

Our "primitive" ancestors may have been less "brutish" than we imagine. Some of them might have been nobler than most of the people walking around today, Lewis surmises. But at some point thousands of years back a few humans--perhaps in an early town-dwelling period--began to set aside honoring God and preferred instead to have their own personal stash of good things that belonged not to a Creator but to themselves. This is The Fall to Lewis, and whether it involved a piece of fruit from a Tree of Knowledge or just something that rightfully belonged to another person or tribe of people is of no matter. Mankind had fallen. The endless repetition of this thievery on through today, for ill-gotten gain large and small, is just a reenactment of what some Christians see as Original Sin.

Not all pain comes from our neighbors. Pain also exists because of nature. The victims of myriad natural disasters for instance. If God intervened and provide miracle upon miracle to avert any human pain, it might be more pleasant but it would not be Life as we know it. He could also intervene constantly to stop the mistakes and follies of humankind that also result in mass pain. But would that be Life either? And is the hand of God in the present and the past staying disasters from nature or human judgement that we do not realize through our senses? This is the core matter of "theodicy" ("Why God allows evil.") It is the dark glass St. Paul said we are forced for now to see through.

Lewis goes on here to explain that the "good" most mortals understand is not so much completely different from that of Our Creator; we understand good, but our actions are often simply not "good" enough. We override our consciences to get what we want, even if the action is plain selfish and we rationalize the wrong somehow.

What we might accept as simply an expedient act, "getting some of our own back" from someone, is plain bad. That people will often look back and regret an action that hurt others shows that our concept of "good" is within us.

Our understanding can be insufficient in the way, the author points out, that a child's first attempts to draw a circle or a wheel on a piece of paper is not very close at all to a wheel as adults could fashion.

It's that humans often only want "kindness" from God, not love. ("Many want a grandfather in Heaven, not a Father" he writes. "Someone who doesn't care what is happening on Earth as long as 'a good time is being had by all'." ) There are consequences for our bad choices.

In this world, or course, a loving parent cannot always be "kind" to a child, for instance. There has to be times of discipline with the fun and indulgence. It's not because the parent doesn't love the child but because the parent is not indifferent to the future development of said child. There is no hint in his writing that restraint and discipline should take the form of corporal punishment, either. That presumably is left to the parent.

The need for hell, as mentioned by Jesus among others in the Gospels, of course has to be addressed. To Lewis, the netherworld is there to punish those people who have chosen to live lives devoted to self. It is not because God has ceased to Love an unrepentant criminal or a immoral person; it is because greedy and violent people must see how far they have fallen from grace. "To forgive is not the same thing as to condone," he writes.

Punishment exists both here and beyond. And shame and guilt are not always something to be expunged by a psychiatrist or a regimen of pills, but can be a chance for one being to feel the pain one has caused another and repent. It is this pain (which Lewis calls "God's megaphone") that sane people experience for past wrong actions.

Before I leave this off I want to make something clear: Mr. Lewis nowhere says that all human suffering is somehow just or delivered from God. All those who suffer from persecution in places like Darfur are, in my mind, suffering the way innocent early Christians suffered and I believe Lewis would acknowledge this. But it is POSSIBLE that some bouts of suffering can have a restorative effect on an individual.

Many people do not come to God until they feel a malady or suffer a personal reverse. When the illness lifts, however, they can be the better for having gone through a bleak period. And it is indeed a loving God who will wait patiently, as he did in my personal life, for some sadness or pain to crop up before I would deign to-- finally!-- acknowledge His gifts to me.

If you'd like to get Professor Lewis' ideas from "the horse's mouth" (and I can do little justice to his reflections here) then picking up a copy of "The Problem of Pain" is a good place to start. (All Lewis major works have been recently reissued.) I don't think one needs to be a committed Christian to gain something from this writings. You will likely come away with a clearer understanding of spiritual matters, and where that takes you might be a pleasant surprise as it was for this blogger.





See link below for more on C.S. Lewis and this book:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0032.html