Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis

Pain is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

(Actually, I want to share every single text of this book in my blog which is impossible, so that I did my best to extract some passage to help you understand why God allow people have pain. I highly recommend you to read the whole book.)

Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil or error may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breed error – if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. Sin may recur because the original temptation continues; but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy.

This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the cause (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin your must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an ‘undoing’ is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over, is sterile – whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time.

Again, when I err, my error infects everyone who believes me. When I sing publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to his charity and humility. But suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one – pity. Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the ‘complex good’ is most markedly disinfected or deprived of that pestiferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt……We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities; and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did know that they are eating, will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world (90~91 p).

Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him, he knows that he is in some way or other ‘up against’ the real universe: he either rebels or else makes some attempt at an adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion…..No doubt Pain as God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul (93~94 p).

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it ‘unmindful of His glory’s diminution’. Those who would like the God of Scripture to be more purely ethical do not know what they ask. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall (96 p).

All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the author. You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward. But what is that to the purpose? When I think of pain – of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spread out like a desert, and the heartbreaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion – stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous torture. If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find it. But what is good of telling about my feeling? You know them already: they are the same as yours. 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 p).