Dave's Book Blog: "The Problem of Pain" by C S Lewis

Thursday 25 February 2021

"The Problem of Pain" by C S Lewis

In Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the hero Yossarian gets angry at the thought of a God who has created a world in which there is pain: "Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who found it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when he robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain? ... Why couldn't He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of His celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person's forehead? Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn't he?”

In this book C S Lewis attempts to show why pain is not only necessary but good, from a theological point of view. He argues that God uses pain to shake us out of our complacency. When we are happy and content, we tend not to think of God. But when we are suffering, we seek God as a comfort. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (Ch 6)

Fundamentally CSL believes that the ultimate human happiness lies in submission to God. He uses the analogy of a man with a pet dog: “The association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it ...man interferes with the dog ... In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem ... to cast grave doubts on the ‘goodness’ of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog ... would have no such doubts.” (Ch 3)

Another analogy, often used in Christianity, is of God as father. But CSL's ideal father is fundamnetally authoritarian: “Love between father and son ... means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make his son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.” (Ch 3)

Pain is therefore the way God whips us into obedience, using the pretext that it is good for us in the long run. This sounds like a classic justification for tyranny.

CSL is aware of this: “These Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.” (Ch 3)

On the whole this is not the sort of God one would choose, if one had a choice.

But presumably to a man like CSL, an Oxbridge don, cocooned in multiple privileges, this is the perfect God because he is the perfect excuse for authority, the authority of the master over the slave, the man over the dog, the father over the child, the husband over the wife, the boss over the worker. Pain and suffering can be justified because it props up the status quo. The only true sin is rebellion.

It wouldn't be so bad if I could feel that CSL's arguments were unanswerable. After all, he was regarded as an expert in three fields: theology, fiction, and mediaeval literature. So it is shocking to discover how clumsy his arguments are.

He has a habit of introducing hypotheses as if they were fact. For example, he states: “Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator” (Ch 6) This statement is unevidenced. But he never makes clear that it is an assumption that could be challenged. He then bases his arguments upon this statement. But there are alternatives! You could instead say: ‘The proper good of a creature is to fulfil its potential’. This would lead to radically different conclusions. Such a use of unacknowledged hypotheses suggests either that he is insufficiently imaginative to conceive of alternative points of view, or that he is using rhetoric in place of reason.

He also enjoys offering dichotomies. This is another rhetorical technique which allows a propagandist to bolster a weak argument. For example, he describes Jesus and says “only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.” (Ch 1) Which is an absurd statement. There are lots and lots of middle ways. Jesus might have been sincere but mistaken, for example. He is deliberately narrowing down the reader's choices to two alternatives so that by demolishing one, you are forced to accept the other. And notice how the work of demolition is packaged into the choice by his description 'unusually abominable'.

In another example he says that our experience of the Numinous (eg dread as opposed to fear) can be explained in only two ways: “either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function ... or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural.” (Ch 1). Of course this is not the only choice. And again, he blackens the path he dislikes, with the adjective 'mere' and the qualifier 'nothing objective and serving no biological function'. (I would argue that dreams are natural but potentially numinous and that dread and wonder could easily have a biological function, as does curiosity.)

There are some thought-provoking moments:

I liked his limitation of omnipotence to "all that is intrinsically possible” but not to intrinsic impossibilities such as self-contradictory concepts: “All things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities.” (Ch 2)
“Our prehistoric ancestors made all the useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry and agriculture.” (Ch 5) I'm not sure I agree, however.
Adam and Eve “wanted ... to ‘call their souls their own’. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe where they could say to God, ‘This is our business, not yours’. But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.” (Ch 5) Accept your subservience. Do not rebel.
“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” (Ch 6)
“The terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. ... Let him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over - I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed.” (Ch 6)
“If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it.” (Ch 8)
“The intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other.” (Ch 9) He is saying that animals are fundamentally evil because some of them are predators.
“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." (Ch 10)

But overall I was appalled at the attitudes revealed in this book and even more shocked at the lack of academic rigour in the arguments. At least it was short.

February 2021; 123 pages