The Problem of Pain (original 1940; edition 2001)

Not my favorite Lewis but it gets points for being the only book that might (in a lefthanded way) reconcile me to _Anne's House of Dreams_ (spoilers.) ( )

when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more that much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.

[Life on Earth] is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another.

Man...is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.

Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant miser of remembering.

All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter.

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? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that.

The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform.

In all developed religion we find three strands...
1) Numinous - this feeling may be described as awe, the object which excites it as the Numinous.

The important thing is that somehow or other it has come into existence, and is widespread, and does not disappear from the mind with the growth of knowledge and civilization.

2) All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel toward certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words "I ought" or "I ought not".

3) The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them - when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation.

Once more, it may be madness - a madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results - or may be revelation.

4) The fourth strand is historical event.

The claim is so shocking - a paradox, and even an horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly - that only two views of this man is 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.

1) He can close his spiritual eyes against the Numinous, if he is prepared to part company with half the great poets and prophets of his race, with his own childhood, with the richness and depth of uninhibited experience. 2) He can regard the moral law as an illusion and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity. 3) He can refuste to identify the Numinous with the righeous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping sexuality, or the dead, or the lifeforce, or the future. But the cost is heavy.

If any message from the core of rality ever where to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has teh master touch - the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.

"IF God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form.

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say "God
can give a creature free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it," you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words "God can".

...because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.

...if you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will. ( )

The problem of pain is C.S. Lewis first book about Christianity. Many readers are disappointed that the book is not about "pain," as they might be looking for solace. In C.S. Lewis' book pain is a problem, because it seemingly denies the existence of God.

In The problem of pain Lewis is still a hesitant apologist. His main thesis is born out of a negation. In the first chapter he refers to the time he was an atheist as "not many years ago" (which was in fact nearly a decade), posing that if anyone had asked him then why he were not a Christian, his answer would refer to the coldness and suffering in the world. Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see. (Lucretius in On the Nature of Things

C.S. Lewis had been an atheist since his early teenage years. The foundation for his atheism seems rather weak. After a Christian upbringing he "abandoned" the faith for Nordic mythology and the occult. It seems Lewis built a personal cult around his professed atheism, which was more like a cloak, a screen behind which he made up his mind about the existence of God.

Although Lewis remained an atheist until at least 1929, when he embraced theism, before his Christian conversion in 1931. The problem of pain seems born out of his youthful "{anger} with God for not existing" and the horrors Lewis had witnessed during the trench war of the Great War in France. His poetry of that period Spirits in bondage. A cycle of lyrics seems to carry the seeds of a return to Christianity, with its focus on evil, pain and suffering.

A peculiar aspect of the publication history is that Lewis originally hoped to publish The problem of pain as shame and inexperience (as a layman) made him want to hide in anonymity. It hints at a certain uncertainty and discomfort at making bold statements, which he however not shuns, and which make this and later books so unpalatable to readers. Unlike many of his later works, which are outspoken apologetic, The problem of pain is written as a theodicy, an attempt at reconciliation.

Superficially, The problem of pain seems a very readable book. At a glance, many sentences are captivating and invite to further reading. However, as in other, later works, Lewis has a very dogmatic style, which leaves the reader no space to make up their own mind. There is no residual trace of doubt in Lewis' mind, but denying readers to retrace their own steps, makes his books unreadable, to all those readers who are less convinced.

Lewis' Christian works are likely enjoyable to Christian readers. But what is the point of writing apologetic works for your own congregation? ( )

既然上帝存在，为什么人和动物还会遭遇痛苦？无论你持有什么样的人性哲学，当你经受痛苦时，你的人生哲学必​C.S.路易斯用饱含同情的笔触和丰富的洞见解开了这个谜题。这是一部真正的杰作，充满了希望、智慧和对人性的真​
路易斯在完成《痛苦的奥秘》一书时（该书初版于一九四零年二次世界大战爆发之际），在前言中，他解释其目​的是为谈谈一些有关痛苦的知性方面的问题，更高一层的目的是教导读者如何获得坚韧不拔的毅力和耐心，不过，​在这一点上，作者说他从未愚蠢地认为自己具备资格，对于他的读者们，除了阐明痛苦与生俱来之外，别无他言，​微小的勇气胜过丰厚的知识，些许同情胜过豪勇，神的一丝关爱胜过一切。​

I was disappointed with "The Problem of Pain". I went into the book hoping for an exploration into the eternal question: Why do bad things happen to good people? or Where was God when....? Lewis' book posits the divinity of Jesus, the redemption of sins through Jesus' death on the cross, and the existence of hell. As a reader looking at the book from a Jewish perspective, every argument he makes falls flat. This is a book very specifically for Christians (and if you are a Christian, you will certainly find the book more worthwhile than I did.) It becomes hard to concentrate on a book when one is at odds with assumed premises, and the fact that it is written in a rather academic style made it even more tedious reading. ( )