The Problem of Pain by
C.S. Lewis
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
C.S. Lewis systematically argues the necessity of pain in God's plan. Ultimately, it comes down to the essential existence of agency. We need agency to show our obedience to God, and we crave agency in order to enjoy true freedom and as a result there must be pain because of other's choices, the result of natural laws, and our own choices. The good news is that we can also use that agency to help others who are experiencing pain. Lewis lays this all down in a building argument with examples. It may not lessen your pain but perhaps give you trust that pain doesn't negate God's love.
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Their history is largely a record of crime, war, disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an agonized apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering.
This feeling may be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous.
seems therefore probable that numinous awe is as old as humanity itself.
somehow or other it has come into existence, and is widespread, and does not disappear from he mind with growth of knowledge and civilization.
two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in a human mind, corresponding to a nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint; or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given.
All human beings that history has heard of acknowledges some kind of morality.
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, an all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
religious development: when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation.
Religion creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world , we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving.
if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all states of matter will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul, nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which he calls his body.
fixed laws, consequences unfolding by casual necessity, the whole natural order, are at once, limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible.
Kindness, mercy as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering....If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness.
We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses--that He would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves; but once again, we are asking not for more love, but for less.
Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere "kindness" which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love.
human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it.
pain insists upon being attended to.
No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unreported rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel son.
If God were a Kantian, who would not have us til we came to Him from he purest and best motives, who could be saved?
We cannot know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God's sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and what we cannot know that we are not choosing, we cannot choose.
the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, arrational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam's dance backward, and returns.
When we act from ourselves alone--that is, from God in ourselves--we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation: and that is why such an act undoes with "backward mutters dissevering power" the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species.
Hamilton: The Revolution by Lin-Manuel Miranda
