Book: The Problem of Pain

Overview

C. S. Lewis sets out to reconcile belief in an omnipotent, wholly good God with the ubiquitous reality of suffering. He distinguishes “pain” broadly to include both physical distress and the deeper anguish of loss, guilt, and fear. His strategy is philosophical and theological rather than sentimental: to clarify what Christians mean by God’s power and goodness, to explain why a world containing free creatures must also permit real hurt, and to show how suffering can be folded into redemption without being excused as a good in itself.

Omnipotence, Goodness, and the Structure of Reality

Lewis first tightens the definition of omnipotence. Divine power extends to all that is intrinsically possible; nonsense does not become sense by prefacing it with “God can.” If God creates a world with stable natures and genuine freedom, He does not at each moment revoke gravity for the falling or suspend human choice whenever it would be misused. A coherent, law-like order is the stage on which meaningful actions, relationships, and virtues can exist, and such a stage inevitably allows for collisions, accidents, and wounds. Likewise, a world of free agents entails the possibility of moral evil; to demand freedom and also demand that it never be used wrongly is to ask for a contradiction.

Divine Love versus Kindness

Lewis challenges the modern tendency to equate goodness with mere kindness. God’s goodness is not the indulgent wish that creatures feel no pain, but the relentless love that wills their true good: to be remade into the likeness of His holiness. He uses homely images, a father disciplining a child, a dentist committed to a necessary but dreaded treatment, an artist refining a work, to suggest why love can be severe. Pain is not a good; it is a signal and a tool. It forces attention, exposes illusions of self-sufficiency, and can become the occasion for repentance and growth.

Human Fallenness and the Role of Pain

The deeper source of our misery is not the world’s structure but the human will turned inward. Lewis defends the doctrine of the Fall as a sober analysis of pride, self-deification, and the consequent disorder within both persons and nature. In such a condition, suffering often functions remedially. It undermines the idol of the autonomous self, presses us toward humility, and opens us to grace. Yet he refuses to romanticize affliction. Pain is genuinely bad; God neither delights in it nor uses it capriciously. Its value lies in what, under grace, it can achieve in us, not in the sensation itself.

Heaven, Hell, and the Stakes of Freedom

The end to which divine love aims is the transformation required for heaven, the participation of creatures in divine life. If that end is real, then moral seriousness follows: our choices matter eternally. Lewis therefore defends the necessity of hell as the natural outcome of freedom persistently set against God. Punishment is not arbitrary wrath but the fixed consequence of choosing separation from the only source of joy and life. Conversely, heaven does not trivialize earthly pain; it answers and surpasses it, not by erasing moral history, but by completing the person in glory.

Animal Pain

Lewis treats animal suffering with caution and speculation. He suggests that many animals lack the self-aware personal center that turns pain into the full drama of moral suffering. He entertains the possibility that predation and animal agony reflect a cosmic dislocation touching nature itself, and he hints that animals may find a form of redemption through their relation to rational creatures under God. He offers no dogmatic solution, only lines of thought to mitigate the scandal without dismissing the reality.

Final Emphasis

The argument neither abolishes mystery nor sanitizes grief. It proposes that a good God can will a world where real persons grow toward real beatitude, and that such a world, by its very logic, includes the risk and reality of pain, pain that love can transfigure into the means of our healing.