Christianity,  Nonfiction

The Problem of Pain

We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”

So writes C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. And so he got me to laugh at myself for being guilty as charged. By the end, I was prepared to reconsider my version of the ideal universe. Though I tend to think of nonfiction as bad-tasting medicine that has to be swallowed from time to time so I can get back to the good stuff, I was ready for this book. So ready. Lately my usual mental strategies for noting cruelty and suffering in the world, and pressing on, have been on the verge of collapse, and I needed a bracing conversation with a challenging thinker who could give me some new categories.

This book certainly filled the bill. It’s not long, but it packs a punch. Lewis’s aim, he says, is simply to “show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design.” In the process he confronts not just human pain, but animal pain; not just finite experience, but questions of justice related to hell and heaven. He deals with popular charges against God, such as that he somehow didn’t know what he was doing when he made the world, or was surprised by sin, or is cruel or contradictory, or missed some better options. In dealing with these things Lewis writes accessibly, for laymen (and women). His brilliance is tempered by real humility. I come away with plenty to think about, and a clearer and more powerful lens for examining such questions.

I value this book for its confirmation of my sanity. There aren’t any questions that were really pressing on me that Lewis didn’t address fairly. I imagine reading it was similar to sitting on the proverbial therapist’s couch and pouring out the soul to an intent ear. But instead of responding, as the joke goes, with, “What do you think the answer is?” Lewis guides the reader down various instructive lines of reasoning and alternative ways of seeing. I don’t close the book feeling any happier about cruelty or suffering, but I have the sense that my complaints have been heard, affirmed, and challenged by a mind I respect.

God is an artist, and we are works of art, says Lewis at one point. The Artist isn’t going to be content until his masterpiece has the character he intends for it, in accordance with his love (which Lewis distinguishes from mere kindness). “It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny,” he writes, “but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.” It’s a tribute to the hunger for meaning that a book arguing convincingly for purposefulness, rather than the removal of suffering, can bring so much solace.