The Problem of Pain

I finished Jack Lewis' The Problem of Pain recently. It was no Mere Christianity, but it was good. As is my custom, I'm going to post a few sections that struck me in particular. The first was my favorite passage from the book.

"My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. 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. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless."

"Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society. [...] And if souls are free, they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition instead of courtesy. [...] Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself."

"God may be more than moral goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai."

"Thoughts undertaken for God's sake--like that on which we are engaged at the moment--are continued as if they were an end in themselves, and then as if our pleasure in thinking were the end, and finally as if our pride or celebrity were the end."

"Indignation at others' sufferings, though a generous passion, needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humanity from those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead."

"The Marxist thus finds himself in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which Christianity paradoxically demands--that poverty is blessed and yet ought to be removed."

"But if suffering is good, ought it not be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads."

"For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John."

"I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man 'wishes' to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free."

"For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you."

"But God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it --made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand."

"Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others--fresh and ever fresh news of the 'My God' whom each finds in Him whom all praise as 'Our God.' For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and by that means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created."

'''God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself.' From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so on forever."

"As there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not all unlike pains in heaven (God grant us soon to taste them)."