Everything on this page is written by UECF.NET as background for readers new to the book. It is our own introductory material, drawn from widely available biographical facts about C. S. Lewis, and it is not a quotation or paraphrase of any passage from The Problem of Pain. The printed book remains the place to hear Lewis in his own words.
Who was C. S. Lewis?
Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was born in Belfast, Ireland, and spent most of his adult life as a scholar of English literature at Oxford and, later, Cambridge University. Raised in a churchgoing home, he became an atheist as a teenager and young man, a position he later described himself as having held for intellectual and emotional reasons of his own. In his early thirties, through a combination of philosophical reading, conversations with Oxford friends — including fellow academic and future Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien — and his own reflection, Lewis moved first to a general theism and then, in 1931, to Christian faith.
From the mid-1930s onward Lewis became one of the twentieth century’s most widely read Christian writers, producing academic literary criticism alongside popular theology, fiction, and children’s literature. He is perhaps best known today for the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia series and for Mere Christianity, a book adapted from wartime BBC radio talks. He was a founding member of the Inklings, an informal Oxford circle of friends who met to read and discuss one another’s writing. Lewis married the American writer Joy Davidman in 1956; her death from cancer in 1960 profoundly affected him and later shaped his short book A Grief Observed. Lewis himself died on 22 November 1963, at his home in Oxford.
Where The Problem of Pain fits in his work
The Problem of Pain, published in 1940, was one of Lewis’s first full-length works of Christian nonfiction, written at the invitation of the publisher Ashley Sampson for a series on questions raised by the Christian faith. It appeared several years before the BBC talks that became Mere Christianity, and it already shows the plain, conversational style and use of everyday illustration that would mark Lewis’s later religious writing. UECF.NET’s note: unlike some of his other books, Lewis wrote this one specifically to address a single, difficult philosophical and pastoral question — how belief in a good and all-powerful God can be held together with the reality of suffering — rather than to give a general introduction to Christian belief.
What the book covers
Across ten chapters and a short appendix, Lewis works through: what it can coherently mean to call God “omnipotent” and “good”; human sinfulness and the doctrine of the Fall; the possible uses, and clear limits, of suffering in the Christian life; the difficult doctrines of hell and animal pain; and finally the Christian hope of heaven as suffering’s necessary counterweight. The book closes with a short appendix by Lewis’s physician friend R. E. Havard, offering a clinical perspective alongside Lewis’s philosophical and theological one. UECF.NET’s chapter-by-chapter study guides, linked from the contents page, summarize and discuss each of these sections in our own words.