The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis Summary, Quotes, and Chapter Outline

Brief Summary of The Problem of Pain

C.S. Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940. It was his first major Christian work. In the book he seeks to reconcile God’s power and goodness with the presence of evil. He calls this “the problem of pain.” Traditionally many have used the term theodicy. To provide an answer, Lewis delves into many areas of Christian thought—apologetics, God’s goodness, the Fall of humanity, heaven, and even animal pain. But Lewis’ main argument, thesis, and answer to the question throughout the book is that God can use evil and pain to mold us and make us into who we each were made to be. This is God’s love. And it is in this, Lewis argues, that we can start to give a response to the problem of pain.

Chapter by Chapter Summary and Quotes

The book consists of a preface and ten chapters (plus an appendix not written by Lewis, so I will not include a summary nor quotes). For each, I will give a chapter summary, trying to formulate his chapter thesis in my own words. Then I will provide no more than five quotes from each chapter (I could’ve included many more! But I’ll limit myself to five).

If you want to get a quick but decently detailed outline of the book, you can just read the chapter summaries. But I would very much encourage you to read any of the Lewis’ quotes.

(I will be citing the copy of The Problem of Pain printed by Harper Collins.)

Preface

Summary

Lewis says he’s not an expert in carrying out what he’s says, nor is he a theologian. He’s hoping this is nothing new, but just orthodoxy. What’s needed more than knowledge is courage, and more than courage, the love of God.

Quotes

• I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. (XII)

1. Introductory

Summary

The problem of pain exists because of the belief in God. So, for this chapter, Lewis shows that belief in Christianity is well founded, using a four-fold argument. First, the Numinous exists. This is not just fear, but dread. This is not just fear of danger; it’s similar to the beauty. It cannot be fully explained. Second, the moral law. There’s not just ‘want,’ but ‘ought.’ Third, the Numinous becomes the governor of the moral ought. Fourth, the historical event. Jesus claimed to be that someone. In this, then, Christianity is the culmination of what human history was leading up to. It’s true. This creates the problem of pain.

Quotes

• In all developed religion we find three strands or elements, and in Christianity one more. The first of these is what Professor Otto calls the experience of the Numinous. Those who have not met this term may be introduced to it by the following device. Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told “there is a ghost in the next room”, and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him; but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is “uncanny” rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called dread. (10-11)
• The third stage in religious development arises when men identify them—when the numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this may seem to you very “natural”. What can be more natural than for a savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which awes him is also the authority which condemns his guilt? And it is, indeed, natural to humanity. But it is not in the least obvious. (12)
• The fourth strand or element is a historical event. There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be “one with”, the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was; and is; precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. (13)
• To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a wise and good Creator or the work of chance, indifference, or malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the religious problem. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I have described…In a sense, it 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. (14)

2. Divine Omnipotence

Summary

Two parts to the chapter. First, God’s omnipotence is his power to do all, but not impossibilities, since “nonsense is still nonsense even when we talk it about God” (19). Second, In a world where choice is possible, there must be a neutral field, we can use it for good or ill.

Quotes

• It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. (18)
• Does this mean an inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalculable evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain intensity are not feared or resented at all. No one minds the process “warm—beautifully hot—too hot—it stings” which warns him to withdraw his hand from exposure to the fire: and, if I may trust my own feeling, a slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking is, in fact, pleasurable. (23)
• We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame them. All matter in the neighborhood of a wicked man would be liable to undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behavior of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be extremely rare…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. (24-25)

3. Divine Goodness

(This is one of my favorite chapters from Lewis’ works. Read this post here for a fuller summary with more quotes.)

Summary

God’s love is his giving us not what we think we need, but what we actually need. He loves us. This is what Lewis calls the “intolerable compliment.” Lewis first explains that God’s love isn’t mere kindness, although it includes kindness. Then he uses four analogies to illustrate God’s love: 1) an artist’s love for their artwork, 2) an owner’s love for a pet; 3) a father’s love for a son; 4) a man’s love for a woman. The problem of pain only comes if we attach trivial meaning to the word “love.”

Quotes

• By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy…There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object, and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. (31-33)
• We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what i have called the “intolerable compliment”. Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child — he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. (34-35)
• To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the “goodness” of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts…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. (36)
• When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some “disinterested”, because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. you asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect”, is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes…The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. (40)
• A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell…We are bidden to “put on Christ”, to become like God. that is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little…To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. if we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows — the only food that any possible universe ever can grow — then we must starve eternally. (46-47)

4. Human Wickedness

Summary

Why is God’s loving alteration needed? Because we’re wicked. This used to be taken more for granted, but no we must relearn it. There’s at least eight things to consider to show our sin: 1) We can be deceived if we look only at the outside; 2) We can this it’s “the system” or corporate guilt, and lose our personal guilt; 3) We can have an illusion that time cancels sin; 4) We can believe that there’s safety in number, as if all men doing something makes it not a sin; 5) We should see that different cultures and ages show us our faults; 6) We try to reduce all virus to kindness; 7) We say Holiness is more than moral perfection—but it isn’t less; 8) We try to shift the responsibility (evolution, etc.). In the end, we must “believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God…when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.” (62)

Quotes

• When the apostles preached, they could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of deserving the divine anger. The Pagan mysteries existed to allay this consciousness, and the epicurean philosophy claimed to deliver men from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to men who knew that they were mortally ill. But all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure. (48)
• A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably angry…When we merely say that we are bad, the “wrath” of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. (50-52)
• We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues — like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. (53)
• We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. (54-55)
• I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact…When the saints say that they — even they — are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. (62)

5. The Fall of Man

Summary

“The thesis of this chapter is simply that man, as a species, spoiled himself, and that good, to us in our present tater, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good” (85). Specifically, Lewis looks at the Fall of Man and how the great sin was Pride, and once that happened, we, as mankind, we changed and became a “spoiled species.” Man didn’t attain merely a new habit of sin, but a “radical alteration of his constitution” (79).

Quotes

• This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to set up on its own, to exist for itself. Such a sin requires no complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual development. From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it…We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of “our own” pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be “our own”. (69-70)
• I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronized. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow-spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet. (74-75)
• They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, “this is our business, not yours.” but there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. (75)
• What man lost by the Fall was his original specific nature. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” The total organism which had been taken up into his spiritual life was allowed to fall back into the merely natural condition from which, at his making, it had been raised…It was the emergence of a new kind of man—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 organ or a new habit; it was a radical alteration of his constitution, a disturbance of the relation between his component parts, and an internal perversion of one of them. (78-79)
• Our present condition, then, is explained by the fact that we are members of a spoiled species…The thesis of this chapter is simply that man, as a species, spoiled himself, and that good, to us in our present state, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good. What part pain actually plays in such remedy or correction, is now to be considered. (81, 85)

6. Human Pain

Summary

With pain being possible in a world created by a good God, now Lewis shows what three purposes pain might have—three “operations of suffering” (97). First, pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil. Second, pain leads us to seek happiness in God. Third, pain teach us self-sacrifice and that we’re finally acting for God’s sake. In this chapter, Lewis is very honest and even personal about pain.

Quotes

• We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms. The first answer, then, to the question why our cure should be painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous pain…Hence the necessity to die daily: however often we think we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive. (88-89)
• Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt…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…A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer. It is no use turning up our noses at this feeling, as if it were wholly base. On its mildest level it appeals to everyone’s sense of justice. (91)
• Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness? (94)
• If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already: they are the same as yours. I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through suffering” is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design. (105)
• 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 to-day, 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. (106-107)

7. Human Pain (cont.)

Summary

Lewis lays out “six propositions necessary to complete our account of human suffering.” They are given in an arbitrary order. 1. There’s a paradox where Christians know pain can be good but not seek it in itself. 2. If tribulation is necessary, we must suppose that it won’t cease until God redeems the world completely or sees it as no longer redeemable. 3. Christian self-surrender and obedience is a theological, not necessarily political, doctrine. 4. Suffering explains why this world can give glimpses of joy, but no lasting security. 5. It’s not helpful to discuss the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” 6. Of all evils, pain alone I sterilized or disinfected evil; it does not proliferate.

Quotes

• In the fallen and partially redeemed universe we may distinguish (1) the simple good descending from God, (2) the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and (3) the exploitation of that evil by God for His redemptive purpose, which produces (4) the complex good to which accepted; suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those by whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. (111)
• 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. (111)
• Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy”, but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. (113)
• The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. (116)

8. Hell

Summary

If God uses pain to redeem and remedy, this implies some aren’t to be redeemed who won’t have it. This is why there’s hell. Lewis three times is honest about the horrors of the doctrine, but he believes it. He addresses five objections to hell: 1) the objection to retributive punishment; 2) its eternality in comparison to transitory sin; 3) the frightful pictures in art; 4) how we could be happy in heaven with hell’s existence; 5) if hell implies God’s loss of omnipotence. Lewis addresses each of these, and concludes that, in the end, in hell God leaves prideful man alone, just as man wants. Lewis soberly ends by reminding: “in all discussion of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. This chapter…is about you and me” (131).

Quotes

• “The Divine labour to redeem the world cannot be certain of succeeding as regards every individual soul. Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. (119-120)
• As things are, however, this doctrine is one of the chief grounds on which Christianity is attacked as barbarous, and the goodness of God impugned. We are told that it is a detestable doctrine—and indeed, I too detest it from the bottom of my heart—and are reminded of the tragedies in human life which have come from believing it…I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable. But I think the doctrine can be shown to be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt, against it. (120-121)
• I have begun with the conception of Hell as a positive retributive punishment inflicted by God because that is the form in which the doctrine is most repellent, and I wished to tackle the strongest objection. But, of course, though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgement consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light, and that not He, but His “word”, judges men. We are therefore at liberty—since the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same thing—to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on him but as the mere fact of being what he is…He has his wish—to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell. (124-125)
• But I notice that Our Lord while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity usually emphasises the idea not of duration but of finality. Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the story—not as the beginning of a new story. That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether this eternal fixity implies endless duration—or duration at all—we cannot say. Dr. Edwyn Bevan has some interesting speculations on this point. We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life but hell was not made for men. It is in no sense parallel to heaven: it is “the darkness outside” the outer rim where being fades away into nonentity. (129)
• 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. In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does. (130)

9. Animal Pain

Summary

If human pain is remedial, what about animal pain? The Christian explanation of pain cannot be extended to animals since they have not sinned. So what do we do about it? Lewis answers three questions. First, why do animals suffer? Here he says we don’t fully know, but we do not that there are sentient but not conscious. Second, what is the origin of pain in the animal world? Lewis’ answer: it’s not the Fall, but satanic. Third, how can animal suffering be reconciled with the justice of God? Possibly through animal immortality through man’s redemption. On this latter point, he gives an extend, unique argument for the possibly immortality of tamed animals, finding it in man’s redemption.

Quotes

• The correct description would be “Pain is taking place in this animal”; not as we commonly say, “This animal feels pain”, for the words “this” and “feels” really smuggle in the assumption that it is a “self” or “soul” or “consciousness” standing above the sensations and organising them into an “experience” as we do. Such sentience without consciousness, I admit, we cannot imagine: not because it never occurs in us, but because, when it does, we describe ourselves as being “unconscious”. And rightly. The fact that animals react to pain much as we do is, of course, no proof that they are conscious; for we may also so react under chloroform, and even answer questions while asleep…But at least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have invented the “sufferers” by the “pathetic fallacy” of reading into the beats a self for which there is no real evidence. (136-137)
• The complete silence of Scripture and Christian tradition on animal immortality is a more serious objection; but it would be fatal only if Christian revelation showed any signs of being intended as a système de la nature answering all questions. But it is nothing of the sort: the curtain has been rent at one point, and at one point only, to reveal our immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. If animals were, in fact, immortal, it is unlikely, from what we discern of God’s method in the revelation, that He would have revealed this truth. Even our own immortality is a doctrine that comes late in the history of Judaism. The argument from silence is therefore very weak. (141)
• If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration. The error we must avoid is that of considering them in themselves. man is to be understood only in his relation to God. The beasts are to be under- stood only in their relation to man and, through man, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers. Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of man and the other animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a man as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. But a Christian must not think so. Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in”. I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood — namely “the-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead”. That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters…In other words, the man will know his dog, the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself. To ask that it should, in any other way, know itself, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. animals aren’t like that, and don’t want to be. (142-144)
• “The beasts heavenly life [footnote:] That is, its participating in the heavenly life of men in Christ to God; to suggest a ‘heavenly life’ for the beast as such is probably nonsense. (146)

10. Heaven

Summary

If “the sufferings of this present world are not worth comparing to glory” (Romans 8:18), then, Lewis argues, in a book about pain we must consider the glories of heaven. We can’t leave heaven out of the discussion; it’s that big. Lewis talks about how we’ve always been searching for heaven. He discusses how God makes each of us unique, like a key for a keyhole we are each created for God’s infinite, different love. He talks about how heaven will be the combination of “my God” with “our God.” Finally, he discusses that heaven isn’t made for us, but us for heaven.

Quotes

• There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. (149)
• I am considering not how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. 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. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you, you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. all that you are, sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction…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. (151-152)
• Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should leave each differently? (154)
• If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St. Paul that a body is a unity of different members. 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 “Ny God” whom each finds in Him whom all praise as “Our God”. For doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created. (155)
• 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…Even within the Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word should be God, it must also be with God. The Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self identity. (156)