CS Lewis (29^th November, 1898 - 22^nd November, 1963¹), was an author and a Professor of Literature at Cambridge. He was famous for his much beloved fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia as well as being a prolific and very popular author in other genres.

His book The Problem of Pain (1940), gives a Christian response to the challenge of reconciling the concept of suffering with a God of love. In this respect the book is a theodicy for this issue, ie, a theological consideration of how evil can be accounted for. It is an intellectual response (discussing the argument) written in a witty and elegant style from this most erudite of authors, rather than one from the heart (discussing the feelings) experienced deeply and personally.

This was not to say that Lewis had not his share of suffering in his early life prior to The Problem of Pain, he lost his Mother when he was but a child and was injured in the first world war. Yet time and academia intervened prior to his penning the book. In Lewis's later life he had the occasion to come across severe suffering and grief, through the loss of his beloved wife Joy Gresham ². In this respect it is useful to read The Problem of Pain together with A Grief Observed (1961) ?written about Lewis's experience of suffering and emotional pain over this period. It provides a human contrast to how we can see a subject differently as we grow and learn.

By the end of A Grief Observed Lewis came to terms with his suffering somewhat, and though his pain was still raw, it was something he had more than just observed, he had lived through it. And his faith, though challenged, remained. For him he might have reflected, as did his contemporary GK Chesterton; 'The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost'.

Selected Quotes: The Problem of Pain

• 'Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.'
• 'Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.'
• 'God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.'
• '[Pain] removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.'
• 'We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.'
• 'Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.'
• '[God] is not proud...He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him.'
• 'Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.'
• 'Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire.'
• 'Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.'
• 'God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.'
• 'All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.'
• 'Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.'
• '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.'

Selected Quotes: A Grief Observed

• 'Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence.'
• 'Nothing will shake a man -- or at any rate a man like me -- out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses.'
• 'Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.'
• [Is reality at its very root meaningless to us?] ...'Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?'
• 'Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.'
• 'And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.'
• 'God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. He only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.'
• 'Partly, no doubt, vanity. We want to prove to ourselves that we are lovers on the grand scale, tragic heroes; not just ordinary privates in the huge army of the bereaved, slogging along and making the best of a bad job. But that’s not the whole explanation.'
• 'Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them—never become even conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?'
• '[Sensing the presence of his wife after her death]..If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be a far more interesting region that the depth psychologists have led me to expect. For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my consciousness.'