A review by joshknape
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

3.0

I think I mostly missed the forest for the trees when reading this work by Lewis--understandable, since I haven't wrestled greatly with the problem of pain. But what I mean is I don't think I got the ultimate point or argument (probably because I already know it and accept it implicitly), and I started enjoying the book only when I paid more attention to smaller insightful points Lewis makes in support of his argument.

Some of the many quotations that struck me:

"[W]e are not to think of God arguing, as we do, from an end...to the conditions involved in it, but rather of a single utterly self-consistent act of creation..."

"'It would be better for me not to exist'--in what sense 'for me'? How should I, if I did not exist, profit by not existing?"

"The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection..."

"I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic command to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else."

"The idea of sin presupposes a law to sin against."

"They wanted, as we say, 'to call their souls their own.' But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own."

"A new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had undergone was not parallel to the development of a new habit; it was a radical alteration of his constitution, a disturbance between the relation of his component parts, and a perversion of one of them."

"If all animals had been herbivorous...they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication."

"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."


"[T]he doors of hell are locked on the inside."

"[U]nion exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things. Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind the times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God. But God created: He caused things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love him, and achieve union instead of mere sameness."

A few things I learned about Lewis's particular Christian theology:

Lewis was apparently a theistic evolutionist. In this book, he does not take the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall literally, explicitly claims God created humans from animals, and says the Fall may or may not have involved the eating of fruit.

Lewis did not believe in the Calvinist Christian concept of total depravity. (I have no opinion on that, as I barely uunderstand total depravity myself.) He thought there were logical grounds for rejecting it.