7 Coping with Suffering: C.S. Lewis on the Problem of Pain
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Coping with Suffering: C.S. Lewis on the Problem of Pain
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
One of the most attractive and winsome themes in Lewis’s thought is his insistence that Christianity offers an imaginatively rich and rationally satisfying ‘big picture’ of life. It makes sense of what we observe around us and experience within us. Lewis took particular pleasure in comparing the Christian faith to a rising sun: just as the sun illuminates the landscape, allowing us to see things that were otherwise hidden in darkness, so God casts light on a dark world.
But is it quite that simple? Now that we’ve had so many conversations with Lewis, we might feel a little more confident challenging him! Does his sun analogy mean that everything is clearly seen? Does it mean that all the shadows vanish as the sun rises? Certainly not! What about the existence of suffering and pain in the world? Surely that raises some difficult questions.
And Lewis would agree. Christianity brings things into sharper focus than any other worldview does, but that doesn’t mean everything comes into sharp focus. It doesn’t mean everything is brightly illuminated. The shadowlands are still there – patches of darkness that the rising sun never fully illuminates. And that means there will be times when the journey of faith leads us through the shadows and into darkness. We encounter things that we do not understand and cannot control. For most Christians, the area of our faith that causes intellectual and emotional discomfort is suffering. Surely there is something wrong here. Why does a good God allow it? And what does suffering mean for our lives?
It’s easy to dismiss Lewis as an ‘ivory tower’ thinker, detached from the harshness of real life. The reality, however, is that Lewis knew suffering first hand, and spent much time reflecting about it. Two of his books – The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed – are devoted to this issue. He clearly thought it important. So let’s imagine that we’re having a cup of tea with Lewis in his rooms at Magdalen College. As the kettle boils, we might begin by asking him to tell his own story, and the role that suffering has played in it.
Lewis’s Experiences of Suffering
Hollywood is great at telling stories; it’s lousy at doing history. The movie Shadowlands tells the story – or at least its own version of the story – of Lewis’s marriage to the American divorcée Joy Davidman and his response to the tragedy of her death from cancer. Everyone who knew Lewis was scathing about its portrayal of Lewis as a socially withdrawn and emotionally distant bachelor, whose life was turned upside down when he fell in love with the demure Joy Davidman.
Yet the most worrying thing about the movie is its core assumption that Lewis was naive, an Oxford don living a cosy and sheltered life which was rudely interrupted by his wife’s cancer. The movie suggests that Davidman’s illness and death showed Lewis that his simplistic faith couldn’t cope with this complex reality and implies that he ended up adopting some form of rather insipid humanism.
This is simply nonsense. So let’s begin by setting the record straight. For the first nine years of his life, Lewis enjoyed a sheltered life. Albert Lewis, his wife Flora and their two sons enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in middle-class Belfast. Albert Lewis’s legal practice was doing well and generated enough income to allow them to move into a large new house in the prosperous Strandtown area of the city. But in 1908, Lewis’s world fell to pieces. His mother was diagnosed with cancer. She died, slowly and painfully, at home in August 1908.
It was a devastating experience for Lewis. We find him hinting at its lingering pain in The Magician’s Nephew. Digory Kirke’s mother is lovingly described on her deathbed, in terms that seem to echo Lewis’s haunting memories of the final days of his own mother’s life: ‘There she lay, as he had seen her like so many other times, propped up on the pillows, with a thin, pale face that would make you cry to look at.’1
Like many of his generation, Lewis was exposed to the massive trauma of the Great War. While serving in the trenches of north-western France, Lewis had witnessed sickening scenes of death, destruction and suffering – such as ‘horribly smashed men’ and ‘sitting or standing corpses’.2 Who could believe in God in the face of such devastation?
Lewis composed some of his early cycle of poems for Spirits in Bondage around this time. His ‘Ode for New Year’s Day’ was written when under fire from German artillery near the French town of Arras in January 1918. This poem solemnly declares the final death of a God who was in any case a human invention. Any idea that the ‘red God’ might ‘lend an ear’ to human cries of misery lay discredited and abandoned in the mud, a disgraced ‘Power who slays’. Lewis himself became a victim of the war. He was wounded in battle in April 1918. Shortly afterwards, while recovering in hospital, Lewis learned that his best friend, Paddy Moore, had been killed in battle.
When Lewis returned to Oxford in January 1919 to resume his studies, he was a battle-hardened atheist. His body was permanently scarred from shrapnel wounds. Still deeper, however, were the wounds inflicted on his soul. Lewis was cynical about religion and dismissive of belief in God. He had experienced more trauma than most of his modern readers ever will.
Yet Lewis’s atheism began to falter, eventually to crumble. By 1930, Lewis had experienced a ‘reconversion’; by the summer of 1932, he had grasped the full imaginative and rational power of Christianity. As The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) makes clear, Lewis now saw life in a very different way.
So how did Lewis’s new way of seeing things affect the way in which he understood pain and suffering? There are three major points at which Lewis deals with suffering. The first is the book which brought him to attention as an apologist – The Problem of Pain (1940). The second is the final novel in the Chronicles of Narnia, The Last Battle (1956). In it Lewis offers a way of seeing the sufferings of this present age in the light of the coming of the new Narnia. The third, of course, is the emotionally raw engagement with suffering in A Grief Observed (1961). We’ll consider both The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed in this discussion.
So let’s imagine that we are comfortably seated in the shabby old armchairs in Lewis’s room in Magdalen College. As we settle down, we might ask Lewis to tell us about his first major attempt to engage suffering. What ideas did he explore in The Problem of Pain, and what method did he use? By now, the kettle has boiled and Lewis is making a steaming pot of tea, as he prepares to tell us his thoughts on pain.
The Problem of Pain
As we learned in an earlier meeting, Lewis was invited to write The Problem of Pain in 1939 by Ashley Sampson, the owner of a small London publishing imprint. He wondered if Lewis might contribute a volume to a series of books he had edited, dealing with challenges to Christianity. Would Lewis write a volume on the problem of pain? Lewis agreed. It was his first work of apologetics.
So what approach did he take? As the movie Shadowlands indicates, Lewis’s approach to suffering in The Problem of Pain is often summarised in a single citation. Suffering is God’s ‘megaphone to rouse a deaf world’.3 This is a rather shallow and simplistic summary of both that book and Lewis’s position in general. At one point, Lewis reflected on the way in which suffering can help us to become better people. One small part of that small section of The Problem of Pain could be summed up in that citation. However, the full quotation perhaps makes Lewis’s meaning clearer: ‘God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.’4
Lewis makes it clear from the outset that The Problem of Pain will not deal with the place of pain in the Christian life. He does not consider himself sufficiently qualified to speak of the way in which pain can help us learn ‘fortitude and patience’. His goal is rather to ‘solve the intellectual problem’ that is raised by suffering.5 This focus leads Lewis to treat pain in an overintellectualised way, which has bewildered some of his readers. Surely Lewis knew that suffering was more than some kind of intellectual crossword puzzle?
Yet we must allow Lewis to deal with the issue on his own terms. Remember, he had been asked to contribute a volume to a series which focused on intellectual aspects of the Christian faith. In accepting the invitation, he had to respect the editor’s briefing about the approach he was to take. Furthermore, it is clear that Lewis treats the ‘problem’ of pain as lying not so much in its emotional impact as in its suggestion that reality is fundamentally irrational. If the world does not make sense, then it is meaningless.
Lewis opens the book by reminding – or perhaps informing – his readers that he used to be an atheist himself. There are hints everywhere in this opening chapter of the themes raised, but not answered, in Spirits in Bondage – human suffering in the face of a seemingly deaf heaven and a silent God. Lewis sketches the universe he himself once believed in, a futile place of darkness and cold, of misery and suffering. This is a universe bound to die, a world in which civilisations pointlessly rise and die, and a human race that science condemns to a final extinction.
In the face of all this pointlessness, Lewis explains to his readers that he initially concluded, ‘Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit.’6 Yet doubts began to arise in his mind. Is it really that straightforward? ‘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?’ Pain is only a ‘problem’ from a Christian perspective. If the universe is meaningless, no explanation need be offered. Pain is meaningless, like everything else.
One of Lewis’s core points is that pain is the price that we pay for being alive. Life is a high-value item, and it comes at a cost. ‘Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself.’7 We need to get used to the existence of pain. That’s just the way things are.
But there is a problem, Lewis suggests. He frames it like this: ‘If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He would be able to do what He wished.’8 The existence of pain calls this into question. Yet Lewis points out that we need to look more closely at the meaning of these words – such as ‘good’. In the everyday sense of the words, there is a problem. But what if they have special meanings when used about God? For example, what if we confuse ‘goodness’ with ‘kindness’? We would then approach the problem of pain from a false perspective.
Lewis suggests that this is indeed what has happened. We have failed to appreciate what the ‘goodness’ of God truly means, and have misunderstood it as an essentially sentimental idea. We must, Lewis declares, learn to see ourselves as the true objects of God’s love – a love which has our best interests at heart, even though we are unable to see or implement these for ourselves. Suffering can show us when we take wrong turns or do bad things. It can bring home to us the frailty and transience of our existence and challenge our belief that we can get by on our own.
Pain thus helps to shatter the illusion that ‘all is well’, allowing God to plant ‘the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul’.9 And it can help us make good choices. Since we, as sinners, tend to rebel against God, there has to be some means by which God can redirect us, helping us to see where we have gone wrong. We would prefer to be left alone, not loved as passionately as this.
Lewis’s argument here is primarily logical, making little appeal to either the emotions or the imagination. We need to get our concept of goodness right, instead of being led astray by what we would now probably call a consumerist understanding of goodness – namely, something that makes us happy, or at least makes us feel better. Lewis asks us to trust that God loves us and wishes the best for us – and wisely sees things that we do not.
To help us grasp this difficult point, Lewis asks us to reflect on four different types of relationships and consider the role that pain plays within each of these.10 Each of these analogies, or models, helps us understand some aspect of the loving relationship between the Creator and the creation. Unusually, each of these analogies is taken directly from the Bible. (Lewis tends to use analogies drawn from literature.)
Lewis’s first analogy is the love of an artist for his creation. Lewis is here thinking of Jeremiah’s description of the relationship of a potter to the clay (see Jeremiah 18). Whenever the potter sees a flaw in the vessel he is producing from a lump of clay, he will start again. The clay is flattened and the moulding process begins once more. The point that Lewis wants us to appreciate is that the potter has a vision for the clay and will not rest until that vision is complete. Remoulding is thus to be seen as a mark of commitment, even if this ‘creation’ is an inanimate object, such as a clay vessel or a building.
Lewis now makes a further point using this same analogy. Any artist is going to take trouble over anything he makes. But what if this is a really important project? What if an artist is trying to paint ‘the picture of his life’ – in other words, the work which marks the height of his career and for which he will be remembered? Wouldn’t he take especial trouble over this? Wouldn’t he want to get this one just right? Lewis then reminds us that human beings are the height of God’s creation. And that means that God takes special trouble over us. He wants to get us right.
The second analogy is the ‘love of a man for a beast’. Lewis has in mind here the relationship between people and their dogs. The Lewis family had pets in Belfast in the early 1900s, and a series of pet dogs lived at Lewis’s home in Oxford. This is an analogy that he feels completely at home with. Puppies have to be trained. Why? So they are healthier and will live longer. The puppies, of course, are quite unaware of the benefits of the training they are receiving and probably see it as the irritating imposition of pain. If the puppy were a theologian, Lewis remarks, it would probably have a rather dark view of human goodness. But this training not only leads to a healthier life for the dog but also opens up a world beyond the natural ability of a dog – such as affection and comfort.
Lewis’s third analogy is that of a father’s love for his son. We must assume that at this point Lewis had in mind his own somewhat dysfunctional relationship with Albert Lewis. The father loves his son and wants to prepare him for the challenges he will face in the world. Just as important, he is aware that his son will not fully understand the ‘risks and dangers’ to which he will be exposed, and must therefore discipline him as a means of protecting him from these dangers.
Finally, Lewis turns to the relationship between a man and a woman, noting that the Bible often uses this model to illuminate God’s relationship with his people. God’s relationship with Israel is often compared to two lovers, just as God’s relationship with the Church is often compared to a husband and wife. True love is about perfecting the beloved. Lewis’s point here is that our relationships with people who really matter to us lead towards change and development on our part. True love involves a willingness to change, to become more like the ones we love. Love is dynamic, not static. God may accept us just as we are – but he isn’t going to leave us there. God wants to move us on, to help us become the people we are meant to be.
Through these four analogies, Lewis sets out to show that real love is transformative. It is not a passive acquiescence in our present state, but a passionate commitment to enable us to transcend our limits and become better people. ‘You asked for a loving God: you have one.’11
Yet there is at least one point at which Lewis moves away from the somewhat cold and clinical realm of logic and moves towards a more imaginative approach. Following his night-time conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson in September 1931, Lewis had come to appreciate the power of the Christian story. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis supplements his essentially philosophical analysis of the problem of suffering by exploring the story of the death of Jesus Christ. Lewis had chosen as an epigraph George MacDonald’s remark that ‘the Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His’. The incarnation of God in Christ, for Lewis, must be the focus of a Christian answer to the problem of pain. ‘God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.’12 Suffering is something built into the structure of the universe. But it is also something that God saw as a means of perfecting his creation.
Now that’s all very interesting. But does it really solve anything? It doesn’t really help all that much to say that the suffering Christians experience in life is a bit like inflicting pain on a dog to make it behave in ways that will extend its lifespan and make it more useful. And while many readers find Lewis’s Problem of Pain satisfying, others feel that it leaves too many questions unanswered and perhaps offers too logical a solution to a problem that is really emotional or existential.
Lewis seems to have realised that there were difficulties with his approach. Perhaps that is why some see the final chapter of the work as offering an important pointer towards a satisfying solution. In this chapter, titled ‘Heaven’,13 Lewis explores how the Christian vision of heaven informs our experience of suffering. Although Lewis’s focus here is primarily on human individuality, we find themes developed that will be explored more rigorously elsewhere – especially in the 1941 sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’. One of these is of particular interest.
Puzzles and Mysteries
The Problem of Pain was written at the beginning of the Second World War. The same fear of German bombing of major southern British cities that led to the evacuation of children from London to places such as Oxford also led to the imposition of a ‘blackout’. At night, cities such as Oxford were plunged into darkness so that they could not be seen from the air. All street lights were turned off; homes were fitted with blinds to prevent any light from escaping. As a result, cities at night were completely unlit.
We’ve already looked at how Lewis conceives ‘understanding’ as ‘seeing’. Lewis used this analogy to suggest that the life of faith is like walking at night in a blackout.14 We don’t see everything clearly. There isn’t enough light. But ‘the blackout is not quite complete. There are chinks.’ At times we glimpse the bigger picture, which reassures us that there is a hidden order and deeper structure. Pain and suffering may make the world appear to be irrational, yet every now and then, there is a chink in the blind and we can see further. We discover that ‘an unattainable ecstasy’ has hovered just beyond our reach, creating a longing for a better world, which is heightened still further by suffering and pain.
The point that Lewis wants us to appreciate is that the world may at times seem to be meaningless. But that is because we live in a darkened world and we cannot see with complete clarity. We are frail, and there are limits to our vision. One day, Lewis argues, things will become clear to us – including the place of suffering within creation. In the meantime, we must be patient and ask what we can learn from this. How can suffering help us become better people?
This is a much more promising approach. Lewis highlights that there are limits to our understanding. We just can’t take everything in. Our minds are too small; the world is too dark. There are bound to be areas of mystery, like the far side of a mountain glacier, where the sun never manages to penetrate.
Let’s make a distinction between a puzzle and a mystery. Austin Farrer, one of Lewis’s closest friends at Oxford University, used this distinction a lot. It came naturally to him, as his wife was a noted author of crime fiction.15 Farrer realised that most detective novels are really puzzles rather than mysteries. Once the reader has enough information, there is nothing to stop him or her from solving the puzzle and producing a nice, neat answer. As long as the information is pieced together properly, a good detective novel allows the reader to work out the identity of the murderer through cool and clinical logic. A puzzle is just a problem that we can solve when we can get hold of enough information.
But not all problems, Farrer argues, are puzzles. Some are mysteries, lying beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp. So what stops us from grasping mysteries properly? Why can’t we solve them? Farrer insists that it is not a lack of information, but something more fundamental. Our minds simply are not big enough to take in these mysteries. There are no slick and neat solutions here. We catch glimpses of possible solutions, but they always seem to lie beyond our reach. Puzzles lead to logical answers; mysteries often force us to stretch language to its limits in an attempt to describe a reality that is just too great to take in properly.
It’s easy to see how this distinction helps us think about suffering. It’s not a puzzle; it’s a mystery. It’s not something we can dissect using cool logic. Farrer pushes us to realise that there are limits to our understanding. A failure to understand something does not mean it is irrational. It may simply mean that it lies on the far side of our limited abilities to take things in and make complete sense of them.
Now Farrer develops ideas that we find in Lewis. And it’s a helpful distinction. Pain is not a puzzle we can solve, as if it were a crossword. It’s a mystery that simply exceeds our ability to understand it.16 And that helps a lot.
A Grief Observed
We noted earlier that the late 1940s was a time of considerable difficulty for Lewis. Mrs Moore, the mother of Paddy Moore, had lived with Lewis since 1919. In the late 1940s, she became increasingly disturbed psychologically. Lewis was unable to look after her at home. He became clinically exhausted and had to place her in a private nursing home. He visited her daily, and never let her know that he was worried he would not be able to afford to keep on paying the home’s rather demanding fees. In the end, Mrs Moore died in an influenza epidemic that swept Britain in early 1951.
Yet the illness and death of Mrs Moore seems to have heightened Lewis’s sense of the transitory nature of life. Pain and suffering did not simply call into question the rationality of the world. They were pointers to human mortality and frailty, a reminder that life does not go on for ever.
After the death of Mrs Moore in 1951, most of Lewis’s close friends expected him to remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. Lewis had shown no romantic interest in any woman. Yet on Monday 23 April 1956, Lewis married Joy Davidman in a civil ceremony at Oxford’s Register Office.17 Davidman was an American divorcée who had befriended Lewis during visits to England in 1952 and 1953. Shortly after their marriage, things went tragically wrong. In October 1956, Davidman fell while trying to answer a telephone call. She was admitted to the hospital, where X-rays showed a broken femur. But they also showed a malignant tumour in her left breast, as well as secondary tumours elsewhere. Her days were numbered. She died at the age of forty-five in Oxford on 13 July 1960, with Lewis by her bedside.
Lewis was devastated. Davidman’s death unleashed a stream of raw emotion and doubt. In the end, Lewis wrote these doubts and emotions down as a way of trying to cope with them. The result was one of his most distressing and disturbing books: A Grief Observed, published in 1961 under a false name (N.W. Clerk). A Grief Observed is basically an edited version of four notebooks in which Lewis kept an uncensored and unrestrained journal of his feelings following his wife’s death. As The Problem of Pain indicates, Lewis had thought about most of the intellectual questions raised by suffering and death before. Yet nothing seems to have prepared him for the emotional firestorm that Davidman’s death precipitated.
Lewis found that his own arguments in The Problem of Pain – such as describing suffering as ‘God’s megaphone’ – seemed simplistic and inadequate in light of the suffering and death of his wife. Lewis seems to have realised that his earlier approach engaged with the surface of human life, not its depths.
Where is God? . . . Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.18
A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regards as a process of testing – not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. ‘God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.’19 Lewis’s journal records his thoughts, no matter how incoherent, as he explores every option. Maybe God is a tyrant. Maybe there isn’t a God at all. Yet these are not conclusions that Lewis has reached after careful analysis. They are merely options to raise and explore, thoroughly and honestly. And in the end, he rejects them. A Grief Observed is a narrative of the testing and maturing of faith, not simply its recovery – and certainly not its loss.
Why? There seems to be a clear tipping point in Lewis’s thinking. It comes when Lewis wishes that he had been allowed to suffer, instead of his wife. ‘If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.’20 Lewis believes that this is the mark of the true lover – a willingness to take on pain and suffering in order that the beloved might be spared its worst. But isn’t that what God did on the cross? Didn’t Christ suffer on behalf of others, so that they might be spared the pain?21 God could bear suffering. And God did bear that suffering.
Reflecting on Lewis’s Approaches
So let’s ask a question. What are the differences between the approaches that Lewis adopted to suffering in The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed ? The most obvious is the tone. The Problem of Pain is coolly logical and clinical; A Grief Observed is searing in its emotional intensity. It remains one of the finest explorations of the process of grieving.
To its critics, Lewis’s approach in The Problem of Pain amounts to an evasion of the reality of evil and suffering as something that we actually experience; instead, suffering and evil are reduced to abstract ideas, which require being fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of faith. To read A Grief Observed is to realise how a rational faith can fall to pieces when it is confronted with suffering as a personal reality, rather than as a mild theoretical disturbance.
Yet what of their approaches? There is an obvious difference in tone. But what about their substance? I have to confess that I have failed to find a major difference between them at this point. Although they feel different, they take me to much the same intellectual conclusion. Suffering does not call into question the ‘big picture’ of the Christian faith. It reminds us that we do not see the whole picture and are thus unable to fit all of its pieces neatly into place. In 1940, Lewis focused on the intellectual discomfort this caused Christians; in 1961, on the emotional distress it caused them.
Lewis’s close friend Austin Farrer suggested that Lewis did not really integrate faith and feelings in his earlier period. Yet this integration seems to have become increasingly important to Lewis as he grew older. Lewis realised the need to ensure that ideas and feelings, theology and the emotions, were connected to one another at a relatively late stage in his life.22 Farrer did not see this as a particular problem. After all, some others fail to do so at all!
In both cases, Lewis’s solution lies in focusing on the crucified Christ. Although the angle of approach is slightly different in each case, there is clearly a common theme. In reflecting on the crucified Christ, we are reminded that God entered into the world in order to bear suffering. It is not something that lies beyond the experience or presence of God.
I have often thought about Lewis’s approaches when giving talks on apologetics. I am regularly asked to talk about suffering by questioners, and have noticed that they tend to come at it from quite different angles. Some see pain and suffering as intellectual inconveniences and want me to sort out the logical niceties for them. Others, however, experience suffering as existentially threatening and frightening. Like Job in the Old Testament, they want reassurance that God really cares for them.
In terms of the ideas I develop, I give similar talks. But the tone of my responses to questioners is quite different. For the first, I use a tone quite similar to Lewis’s Problem of Pain, although I note the pastoral importance of the question. For the second, I talk about the emotional distress that can be caused by pain and suffering, and mention Lewis as an example of someone who went through this experience himself – and came out on the other side. ‘I didn’t know that!’ is almost invariably the response. ‘I must read A Grief Observed.’
That’s enough for this tea-time conversation. Pain, suffering and evil are not easy topics to discuss, partly because they raise uncomfortable questions about how much we can understand anything. Lewis gives us some important and helpful pointers in contemplating the mystery of human suffering. But the problems of pain and suffering did not go away for Lewis. Soon after Davidman’s death, Lewis realised that his own days were numbered. So as we bring this book to a close, let’s imagine we are having lunch with Lewis at The Trout, a riverside pub just outside Oxford. We shall look at Lewis’s views on hope and heaven, and how these helped him in the final phase of his life.
