The PROBLEM OF PAIN
C. S. Lewis
Copyright
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First published in Great Britain by Geoffrey Bles 1940
Copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd 1940
Cover design and illustration by Kimberly Glyder
The right of C. S. Lewis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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Source ISBN: 9780007461264
Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007332267
Version: 2015-11-20
Dedication
The Inklings
The Son of God suffered unto the death,
not that men might not suffer, but that their
sufferings might be like His.
GEORGE MACDONALD,
Unspoken Sermons, First Series
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
Chapter 1 - INTRODUCTORY
Chapter 2 - DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE
Chapter 3 - DIVINE GOODNESS
Chapter 4 - HUMAN WICKEDNESS
Chapter 5 - THE FALL OF MAN
Chapter 6 - HUMAN PAIN
Chapter 7 - HUMAN PAIN, CONTINUED
Chapter 8 - HELL
Chapter 9 - ANIMAL PAIN
Chapter 10 - HEAVEN
APPENDIX
Footnotes
About the Author
Books By C. S. Lewis
About the Publisher
PREFACE
they remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilisation has done so, no one will dispute; that it will pass away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it should not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race that comes into being in any part of the universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a uniform infinity of homogeneous matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.
There was one question which I never dreamed of raising. I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists case at once poses us a problem. 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? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.
It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled. For centuries, during which all men believed, the nightmare size and emptiness of the universe was already known. You will read in some books that the men of the Middle Ages thought the Earth flat and the stars near, but that is a lie. Ptolemy had told them that the Earth was a mathematical point without size in relation to the distance of the fixed starsa distance which one medieval popular text estimates as a hundred and seventeen million miles. And in times yet earlier, even from the beginnings, men must have got the same sense of hostile immensity from a more obvious source. To prehistoric man the neighbouring forest must have been infinite enough, and the utterly alien and infest which we have to fetch from the thought of cosmic rays and cooling suns, came snuffing and howling nightly to his very doors. Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.
At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never made.fn1 Religion has a different origin. In what follows it must be understood that I am not primarily arguing the truth of Christianity but describing its origina task, in my view, necessary if we are to put the problem of pain in its right setting.