The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis (1940; written during World War II) is not a long book; it’s about 150 pages in length. That makes it very portable, and indeed, I’ve been lugging the darn thing around for months now. That’s not because it took me so long to finish; it’s because I keep re-reading it. Lewis has the special gift of causing you to see things you thought settled, differently. It’s almost as if he substitutes his own glasses prescription for the one you’ve been wearing, and you are startled at the new sights you see.
That quality also makes it difficult to know how to cover the book in detail, for new dimensions of thought open up, leading down disparate paths that would seem to be impossible to have come together down the line. In addition, without the benefit of the Restored Gospel, there are one or two matters on which Lewis innocently errs, which things must be disentangled from the meatiness of the rest.
All this is to say this has been a challenging review to write, but a very worthwhile challenge it has been.
I. This is a World of Pain
Lewis begins by pointing out our desperate dilemma: this is an existence of unrelenting pain. Life on this earth is “so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying upon one another . . .Creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die.” (2) To man is given extra pain: “he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.” (2) When happy, men simultaneously know that happiness is only temporary, and while in pain they know their remember their former happiness, now but a memory. In addition, man purposefully inflicts pain on others through crime, war, and terror. “The race is doomed . . . all stories will come to nothing.” (3)
How, then, could man ever imagine there was a good God? In fact, Lewis challenges us to “reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform.” (5) Touché.
Lewis opines that religion arose in such a world through a leap made from two experiences all men share: awe of the natural world, and the Golden Rule. Each human being at some time or another feels that awe, or even dread, of the power of the natural world; a power capable of breaking all men’s plans to control it. At the same time, human communities can only persist as some form of “do unto others as you would want them to do unto you” is obeyed. While the rich and the powerful often put themselves above this law, it is a law unto most of humanity, and we feel obliged to follow it.
The leap from these two experiences, in Lewis’ eyes, is when at some point in human history, men come to believe that the power that creates awe in us is in fact also the guardian of the Golden Rule. That great power, now seen as God, authors and endorses the Golden Rule. Lewis notes that it is indeed a great and even counter-intuitive leap, for “the actual behavior of that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no resemblance to the behavior which morality demands of us. The one seems wasteful, ruthless, and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite qualities.” (12)
And then there is Christ, who is embodied in this world of pain as a symbol of that very leap, who represents that despite experiencing exquisite suffering and pain, there is an existence beyond these things. As Lewis expresses it, Christianity “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)
So what’s up with this? Why would a Creator, assuring us that ultimate reality is happy, create a world of pain? Lewis gets as close to a good answer as he can without the insights of the Restored Gospel, which is very close indeed. We must first understand the context in which pain arises, according to Lewis. For consciousness of self to exist—for there to be the possibility of free souls—there must be something against which the self can be contrasted. There must be “others” for us to exist as selves, as agents, and there must be a separation of existence between self and others. (Indeed, Lewis believes God Himself needs “others,” and thus, the Trinity arose to provide “society” for God. The Restored Gospel, of course, suggests God enjoys an immense society.) Embodiment fulfills the task of demarcating self from others. Further, there must be an environment within which selves can interact and within which choices can be made, or, as Lewis puts it, “a common space and common time, to give the co- in co-existence a meaning: and space and time are already an environment.” (21) And this environment must have stability—it must not be able to vary according to every whim of the selves that inhabit it, for then others might disappear once more.
But, according to Lewis, one thing more is needed: there must be things to choose among that vary in their agreeableness to the self and to others. For there to be a Golden Rule, there must be something you don’t want to happen to yourself, and thus something that you should not do to others. That is, there must be good choices and evil choices, as Father Lehi taught.
To sum up, then, for Lewis, there are several pre-requisites for a soul to come to know God: there must a world which operates under laws that give it a fixed nature, and there must be separated, embodied souls within that world that can interact with each other and with the world, and there must be “opposition in all things” to make possible good and evil. As Lewis puts it,
“So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the whole order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have secluded life itself.” (25)
II. What Does “God is Love” Mean?
So why all the suffering? Lewis asserts that to even approach this question, we must first ask, if God is Love, what precisely does Love mean?
Some—many in our day—might suggest that Love is Kindness: “What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter, as long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves,’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’” (31)
Lewis is having none of it: “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness . . . Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escape suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards that are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. It is for people 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.” (33) Kindness, in the end, is “at the opposite pole from Love.” (38)
While Lewis did not in his lifetime fully comprehend the “family tradition” we are to carry on, and says “it passes reason to explain why . . . creatures such as we should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes” (39), the Restored Gospel teaches us that there is in fact a Heavenly Family Occupation, and that we are literally God’s children, meant to be God’s heirs and take upon ourselves that same Occupation. We are God’s apprentices, learning what it takes to “bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.”
We naturally emphasize our own human story in the Great Plan of Happiness, but we often do not see that it is also God’s story. And that narrative arc is that God must suffer the estrangement of each and every one of Their children, and must witness each child either succeed or fail in reestablishing a full relationship with their Heavenly Parents, with the relationship now based on wisdom, not innocence. What an immense Passion play this is for God! It must grip our Heavenly Parents to the core. In fact, Lewis senses this other side of the story:
“We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest ‘well pleased.’ To ask that God’s love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable . . . What we would here and now call our ‘happiness’ is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. . . . When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. [God] marshals us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. . . . [W]hether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” (41, 46, 47)
Again, while Lewis unfortunately thinks of man as creatures, puppets, objects created by God, and not as eternal intelligences whose will cannot be coerced and whose destiny is to become as their Heavenly Parents are now, his description still fleshes out that other side of the story of the Plan. Surely this is God’s glory—that Their estranged, fully agentic children voluntarily turn to their Heavenly Parents and seek to align their will with God’s. It is for this glory that our Parents embraced “the problem which God had set Himself when He created the world; the problem of expressing His goodness through the total drama of a world containing free agents, in spite of, and by means of, their rebellion against Him. . . . [But] God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.” (79-80)
III. Turning Back Must Needs be Painful
What is involved in turning back to our Heavenly Parents? Lewis argues that “the human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. . . [P]ain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (91)
Pain rouses; pain wakes us. Lewis expresses it thus: “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. . . [P]ain removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” (93, 94)
But what of the righteous who suffer, for they do suffer pain as well as those who are evil? Lewis again:
“We are perplexed to see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people—on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little tradespeople, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seems to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right . . . Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, hat God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. . . The creature’s illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered . . . 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.” (95, 96)
Interestingly, Lewis points out that this is all evidence of the humility of God. That is, no doubt God would prefer we turn to him naturally, and not turn to Him as we do a parachute when the plane is falling out of the sky. No, says Lewis, “He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had. . . It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts.” (96)
And the turn to God cannot come save by sacrifice—painful sacrifice. Furthermore, the sacrifice must be contrary to our own inclinations. “The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.” (98) I believe this is why childbirth is accompanied by pain; for motherhood to be a pivotal turning to God, with all the power that state endows a woman with, it cannot be effected through an attractive, desirable experience. Returning to God, undoing the Fall, “the untying of the old, hard knot, must be when the creature, with no desire to aid it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible.” (100)
But of course we are in reality not alone when making our sacrifices. With the act of sacrifice comes an endowment of power from on High, and we are led by God to a truer self-sufficiency, a more powerful will—for we are now linked to God’s will and power. Indeed, Lewis notes, “Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s.” (101) Moreover, “Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a ‘copy,’ not an original.” (103-104)
Unfortunately, the need for pain persists throughout our lives, according to Lewis. He explains that after an experience of pain:
“[F]or a day or two [I] 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 the 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.” (107)
Lewis suggests that means “Christian[s] cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow.” (114-115) Nevertheless, we should not stop trying to improve the lot of mankind because “a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least a good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can.” (115)
Pain, then, is capable of producing what Lewis calls a “complex good.” Now, pain itself is not good and should never be sought for oneself or for others. Even asceticism can be a rebellion from God, for example, making an idol of one’s self-sufficient willpower. However, pain is also rightly seen as a complex good because God can make use of the pain in the world to turn souls to repentance. Our orientation to the pain produced in the world is important, however, even aside from our own reaction to our own pain. Lewis suggests:
“A merciful man aims at his neighbour’s good and so does ‘God’s will,’ consciously cooperating with the ‘simple good.’ A cruel man oppresses his neighbor, and so does simple evil. But in doing such evil, he is used by God, without his own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first man serves God as a son, and the second as a tool. 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)
Son or tool, then. Judas or John. Make your choice, but God will produce good from either course.
And, fortunately or unfortunately, God does not wish us to strive to be apathetic in the face of pain, for the purpose of pain is to rouse us from stupor and illusion. If we are merely indifferent to pain, cultivating a heart of stone, it can produce no spiritual good in our lives. He notes, “the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death if such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not.” (113)
Of course, life is not all pain: “joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. . . . Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” (116)
IV. Hell
If we now understand the spiritual purpose of pain, we realize that its purpose demands there be a Hell. For the decision to turn to God to be freely chosen, it must be possible for the choice to be refused. Lewis wonders at “a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. . . .so much mercy, and yet still there is Hell.” (121)
Not being redeemed is the just recompense for the refusal to accept redemption. How could it be otherwise? After all, as Lewis puts it, “a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.” (124) This is not a sentence imposed on an unwilling prisoner, but merely allows the man to continue to be who he is, for that is what he most desires. Lewis also infers he’ll be alone, for “The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him [and] death removes the last contact.” (125)
Of course, the Restored Gospel suggests that there is still some time to repent in the post-mortal existence before final judgment, so there are still chances after death. But even so, “finality must come some time.” (126) And the result is torment, presumably eternal: “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.” (130)
One might feel, as I have tried to express and discuss in my other essay for this issue of SquareTwo, and which Lewis also echoes, “that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity.” (130)
Of course, with the perspective the Restored Gospel give us, it is not God’s “handiwork” rejecting Him, but His very own sons and daughters.
V. Heaven
I confess that my favorite part of Lewis’s small volume is his final chapter on Heaven, which is as relevant to the topic of pain as is Hell. The chapter echoes themes upon which Lewis would later write in the final volume of his Narnia series, The Last Battle.
Because his argument paints Heaven in a light I have never seen articulated by another, I feel to offer a somewhat lengthy excerpt from the chapter rather than annotate with my own thoughts. I think you will find his views enthralling:
“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at least you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say ‘Here at last is the thing I was made for.’ We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
“This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. 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 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 save, 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.
“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it . .. The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. But we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the blackout is not quite complete. There are chinks. At times the daily scene looks big with its secret.
“The thing you long for summons you away from the self. . . . This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the breast must be cast upon the waters, he that loses his soul will save it. But the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. . . Surely each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, living all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. 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. . . . 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 ‘My God’ whom each finds in Him whom all praise as ‘Our God.’ For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, 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.
“For union exists only between distincts; and perhaps, from this point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things . . . [God] caused things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His bread upon the waters. . . . [It is God’s will] that we should go on to the maximum distinctiveness there to be reunited with Him in a higher fashion. . . .[I]t is not sufficient that that Word should be God, it must also be with God. . . [D]eity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self-identity. . . . [E]ach soul, we suppose, will be eternally engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it receives.
“But when [what we give] flies to and fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance ‘makes all heaven drowsy with the harmony.’ All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance.” (150-158)
Our Heavenly Parents are the Lord and the Lady of the Dance, and They invites us join that dance of joyous union for we are individuals of eternal distinctiveness who each add something only we can add. I feel there is something deeply true in Lewis’ vision of heaven.
VI. Conclusion
Lewis gives us far more than insight into the nature and necessity of pain. He gives us a larger view of the Great Plan, opening vistas to our eyes clouded by earth living. Heaven and Hell reveal some of their secrets as we decipher what is meant by those terms. Pain, it appears, is our teacher and guide throughout the years of our life on earth, and not simply an intermittent pest. We must remember that “He only is saved who endureth unto the end.” (D&C 53:7) We cannot leave pain behind in this life, even if we are righteous, and whether we leave it behind in the next is quite up to us. While I am not sure anyone can come to appreciate pain, we can turn and face it, and learn what we are to learn from it. Enduring pain can be God’s offering of an endowment of power, if we have the eyes to see it.
In the end, Lewis’ own comments seem fitting: “[F]or 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) Amen to all that!
Appendix:
There were other quotes by Lewis in this book I wished to comment upon, but there was simply no space. Enjoy these quotes, and provide your own commentary!
“[Man] can refuse to identify the Numinous with the righteous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping sexuality, or the dead, or the lifeforce, or the future. But the cost is heavy.” (15)
“[M]atter [i]s that which separates souls, and matter [i]s that which brings them together under the single concept of Plurality, whereof ‘separation’ and ‘togetherness’ are only two aspects.” (26)
“A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity . . . In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pull the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can.” (50)
“It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments [where we sin] but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion and glad it should be common knowledge in the universe.” (55)
“[W]e cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet . . . It may well be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life.” (57, 58)
“The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.” (59)
“Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.” (59)
“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.” (61)
“A lover, in obedience to a quite uncalculating impulse, which may be full of good will as well as of desire and need not be forgetful of God, embraces his beloved, and then, quite innocently, experiences a thrill of sexual pleasure; but the second embrace may have that pleasure in view, may be a means to an end, may be the first downward step towards the state of regarding a fellow creature as a thing, as a machine to be used for his pleasure. Thus the bloom of innocence . . . is rubbed off. . . . The gravitation away . . . must be a product of the Fall.” (70-71)
“The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.” (96)
Full Citation for this Article: Cassler, V.H. (2024) "Book Review: The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis (1940)," SquareTwo, Vol. 17 No. 3 (Fall 2024), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCasslerProblemOfPain.html, accessed <give access date>.
Would you like to comment on this article? Thoughtful, faithful comments of at least 100 words are welcome.