series of six volumes on Christian doctrine written by C.S. Lewis – is a
short, 157-page book that packs a major philosophical punch. For a patient, curious reader -- not normally your humble reviewer -- The Problem is a smoothly articulated, intuitive journey through the mind of a brilliant academic, one who reverted back to his faith in his early thirties after an intense period of informed and thoughtful atheism.
Born in Belfast in 1898, Clive Staples Lewis demonstrated a penchant for
independent thinking early, insisting on changing his name to Jack - a name
that obviously did not stick - when he was only four years old. If there is
any doubt about his superior brainpower, his illustrious career - teaching
at Oxford University for more than thirty years, then at Cambridge for ten
more until his death in 1963 - should stamp it out completely.
My point here is that anything Lewis has to say about the “problem”
of pain and God is not likely to be superficial clap-trap, so despite the
fact that I am neither a Christian nor the sort of patient, curious reader
his writings typically attract, I decided to give them a shot.
"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. But the creatures
are not happy." In this brief statement, at the very beginning of Chapter
Two, Lewis summarizes the issue. Put another way, he asks how a loving and
powerful God can allow so much pain and suffering to be experienced by
humans.
Apparently, Lewis writes, "God lacks either goodness, or power, or
both. This is the problem of pain in its simplest form." To up the ante
slightly, he also insists that if God is not good, there would not be a
problem of pain.
My introduction to Lewis began when my mother read aloud to me the second
in the Narnia series The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when I was eight
years old. Reportedly one of the best selling books of all time, it carried
me into a blissful fantasy world, though the Christian allegories whizzed
right past my slowly developing little Jewish girl mind.
(Interestingly, The Lion did inspire me to start writing my own "magical
doorway" book, in which my elaborately enhanced siblings and I escaped
through our home's ominous grey oil furnace into a purple forest with orange
birds and yellow rabbits. Almost immediately I learned that fiction writing
was not in my future.)
The dilemma confronted by Lewis in The Problem of Pain is obviously
not uniquely Christian, nor was it particularly new to the twentieth century.
How to reconcile pain and suffering with a just and loving God is a question
that has troubled people of faith throughout history. Indeed, the Book of
Job, an early inscription in the Hebrew Bible, deals with the matter in a
direct and unflinching manner.
Job was an unfailingly righteous man who was given every blessing a
person could want: a beautiful, healthy family, a thriving business and
great wealth. Gradually, through a series of tragedies, everything he
cherished was taken from him until he was poor, sick and without family. His
friends begged him to repent his sins, since they could not conceive of such
losses occurring without sin. But Job steadfastly refused, insisting he had
always been nothing but a good and righteous man.
Eventually, Job confronts God, demanding that He explain why He has
inflicted so much agony on a faithful and righteous servant such as him.
God answers by posing His own question in what might be described as an
uncharacteristically sarcastic tone: "Where were you when I created the
universe?"
The meaning and power packed into that one statement is nothing
short of stupendous. First, God acknowledges that Job’s afflictions
originate with Him, thus confirming that pain and suffering are not
necessarily a punishment for any transgressions, but are nevertheless part
of the master plan. Second, God asserts that His master plan – including,
presumably, the role pain and suffering play in that plan – is beyond the
comprehension of mere mortals who are themselves, after all, just a part of
the master plan.
Satisfied at least that he is not to blame for his or his family’s
suffering, Job accepts with humility that there are limits to human
knowledge – an important lesson in epistemology – and remains a faithful and
a righteous man. His life improves. He marries again, has more children, a
new business, and his wealth is restored. He is also now wiser, particularly
about God, understanding that if God is good, then everything he does must
also be good, including even what appears to us, from our limited
perspective, to be bad.
This does not mean that within the context of our human perspective
we are not obliged to be concerned with the welfare of our fellow human
beings and alleviate their suffering whenever and wherever possible. (We are
so obliged, and that too is part of the “master plan”.) It simply means that
the existence of pain and suffering as we experience and understand it is
not, ultimately, incompatible with a good and just God, nor is it a very
sophisticated argument against His existence.
Lewis eventually comes to this same conclusion, but by taking a
different route and a few side streets, most of them involving Jesus. He
makes numerous discoveries along the way, including, for example, that
unhappiness is inseparable from the free will with which human beings are
endowed by their Creator.
Lewis’ approach to addressing the problem of pain and God is
methodical. He begins with a discussion of how there is obviously much
suffering and other evils in the world, most or all of which have existed
since prehistoric and pre-religious times. He points out how a pessimist
might address the issue by asking: “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?”
Lewis says all religions which adhere to the notion of a loving and
good Creator began from three fundamental elements, with Christianity having
one extra. They are: the experience of the Numinous (a sense of awe or
dread); morality; and the Numinous as the guardian of morality. Christianity
includes Christ, who for some is the ultimate redeemer.
Lewis argues that it is impossible for certain non-natural things --
for example, fear of dead bodies (which, he points out, are the most
harmless kind of bodies that exist) -- to have been invented without some
kind of spiritual experience by pre-religious humans. From such a
non-empirical experience, Lewis deduces, humans must have learned about
spirituality through a non-empirical source, namely, God. Thus religion,
Lewis suggests, is born alongside such non-natural human elements as awe,
dread and morality.
Awe and dread are connected in the sense that humans feel awe, not
as normal or natural fear -- of for example a tiger in the next room -- but
as a religious sense of overwhelming spirituality, or Numinous, which he
defines as "an object which brings about a sense of dread within us." It is
impossible to have this feeling "from the facts of the universe" he argues.
Moreover, it is impossible to be too smart or too intelligent to overcome
Numinous; hence, I would conclude, the countless numbers of intelligent
thinkers who continue their dedication to organized religions.
Morality, the other element that exceeds the reality of the natural
world, Lewis refers to as a feeling of guilt, or "oughtness" which, like
awe, can never be explained by the physical universe. "Morality," he says,
"like Numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be
'given' in the facts of experience." Going one step further, these various
moralities -- as part of different religions -- are both approved and
disobeyed.
Lewis insists that morality has nothing to do with the natural world
and that, like awe and dread, must have somehow come from the spiritual
realm that was revealed. His insistence that religion combines awe/dread and
morality is coupled with his curiosity about why this is so, since they do
not connect naturally.
"The actual behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts
bears no resemblance to the behaviour morality demands of us," he says. "The
one seems wasteful, ruthless and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the
opposite qualities." Somehow, in the assembling of religions by God and
humans, these disjointed elements are integrated.
On God's freedom, Lewis says, it "consists in the fact that no cause
other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them -
that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own
omnipotence the air in which they all flower.” Yet, the nagging question
persists: How can this omnipotent and wise God allow pain to exist in His
world?
Lewis explores God's intrinsic goodness: “If God is wiser than we His
judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in
His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil." It sounds almost like
we've come full circle back to the Book of Job -- a part of the Bible Lewis
mentions more than once -- but that does not mean that The Problem of Pain
should be put down after a few chapters. The book is replete with one
fascinating insight after another into both the human condition and how
religions began, so it is a must for anyone who has an urge to discover such
mysteries.
As with most books on Lynne Like's, you can get this on Amazon.ca.
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