The Problem of Pain

Here are my notes from my recent study of The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis.  I go chronologically through the book with quotes that highlight important concepts for me, and also serve as a sort of guide through some of his over-arching logic.  If anything doesn't seem fully or well explained, it's because I took short quotes and I'll direct you to the book itself to figure out exactly what he's saying.

I've included page numbers, though my copy is a rather old and obscure version - it doesn't even have an ISBN number!  Macmillan press, 1962 edition, 1975 printing.

"Food for thought" simply means that I haven't quite got my head around it or don't quite agree, but want to think about it some more.  Asterisks indicate passages that directly relate to conversations Andy and I have had recently (sometimes multiple times, sometimes quite heatedly) and give some further insight (or validation) for our views.

If you don't want to read it all, skip to the last section, the Best Part Ever.

~

"That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare." (33-34)

"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." (34)

"Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.  If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness." (41)

food for thought:
"The place for which He designed them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for.  When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained.  When we want something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy." (52)

"Every vice leads to cruelty.  Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty." (65)

If we truly were in a "creaturely" state to God, then, as Lewis's logic goes, it would be temptation and sin to become as a God, to have and desire independence and free will as separate beings from God.  Granted, we cannot gain eternal growth, independence, and free will (that results in consequences) without becoming dependent on God and giving up our free will to Him - He who loses his life for my sake shall find it.

"The first answer then to the question of why our cure should be painful is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain." (91)

* "Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself.  They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust.  What can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of deterring others if I do not deserve it?" (93-94)

"It is a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping.  If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms; but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, 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." (97)

* "It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them.  I emphatically embrace the first alternative.  I believe ... that 'they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will.' God's will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good." (100)

food for thought:
"If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme trial or sacrifice it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be called his own.'  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" (102)

"I am not arguing that pain is not painful.  Pain hurts.  That is what the word means.  I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made 'perfect through suffering' is not incredible.  To prove it palatable is beyond my design." (105)

* "Indignation at others' sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humility from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead." (108)

"If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees that world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable." (114)

"Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them." (114)

"Pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate.  When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy ... Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the 'complex good' is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil generally."(like error and sin, as he describes) (116-117)  Andy made an interesting point here that this isn't entirely true - that there are pains like abuses and trauma that continue to have lasting effects and cause more pain, proliferate it.

* "Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself, but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances." (122)

"The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he is (wicked), is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving.  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." (122)

hell - punishment, destruction, privation
fire evokes both torment and destruction
destruction = unmaking, or cessation (no more progress) of the destroyed (though I don't hold to the notion of becoming unmade completely, of no longer being a soul) (124-125)

~

Best Part Ever:

"I am considering ... why He makes each soul unique.  If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one.  Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.  Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.  For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you.  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it." (147-148)

"What can be more a man's own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and him?  And what shall we take this secrecy to mean?  Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than any other creature can." (150)

Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently?  If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.  Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different members.  Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others - fresh and ever fresh news of the 'My God' whom each finds in Him whom all praise as 'Our God.'" (150)

"For doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created." (150)

"For union exists only between distincts."