Peace, Child; You Don’t Understand: Theodicy in the Writings of C. S. Lewis

By Eamon McGraw

[Eamon McGraw is serving overseas as a Chaplain in the United States Navy. He holds the rank of lieutenant and is ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America.]

ABSTRACT

C. S. Lewis’s works, though diverse in both content and style, consistently contain reflection on the problem of evil. Lewis wrote both apologetic works as well as a variety of essays, poems, and imaginative fiction, and it is this diversity of material that makes his theodicy so valuable. Whether we intend to examine the logical problem of evil or address the far more personal religious problem of evil, Lewis gives insight from multiple perspectives by tying together theology, logic, aesthetics, emotion, and experience into a robust and unique theodicy. Drawing on the major apologetic works (The Problem of Pain and A Grief Observed) and numerous letters, essays, and poems, as well as several imaginative works (Chronicles of Narnia, Space Trilogy), this article will offer a critical analysis of his theodicy and suggest relevant aspects for apologetics and pastoral ministry.

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I cried out for the pain of man,
I cried out for my bitter wrath
Against the hopeless life that ran
For ever in a circling path
From death to death…[1]

All things are full of weariness: a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 1:8–9)

Since man’s first acceptance of the serpent’s lies, humanity has wondered over the problem of evil. Whether it is Job and his friends’ confusion, Paul’s potter and clay, or the martyrs’ impatient cry, Scripture itself is full of the confused, and occasionally indignant, cry of the oppressed. Perhaps the grieving parents of murdered Abel understood something of their own complicity in the advent of evil, and perhaps too they felt anticipation for the one whose blood would speak a better word, but it was not long before the weight of the curse prompted questions about the God who is and the evil which should not be. The first logical formulation of the problem of evil is attributed to Epicurus some 2200 years ago (though we might justly ask if the groans of enslaved Israel or the poetic cries of David were less logical for their humility—does logic require impudence?). Towering intellects have struggled mightily to resolve the tension, yet they have, more often than not, failed to produce an answer which is both intellectually sound and existentially satisfying. The question, for both Christians and skeptics alike, continues to be either a thorn in the flesh or a stumbling block. Blocher wrote that “while it is evil that tortures human bodies, it is the problem of evil that torments the human mind.”[2] Whether our interest is in the intellectual challenges which face humanity, the pastoral care of the flock, or evangelism to a dying world, the problem of evil is a subject which we cannot afford to ignore.

Though there is nothing new under the sun, including as we have seen, the debate over the problem of evil, we would be wise to understand the particularities of our culture and the current debate. The modern perspective is different from ages past; many assumptions have shifted. Lewis offered a clear summary of this shift:

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defense for being the god who permits war, poverty and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock.[3]

Lewis captures the ridiculous nature of this shift through subtle humor: man is a “kindly judge” and “the trial may even end in God’s acquittal.” Who are you, O man? The shift itself presumes the outcome, or rather it is the outcome. The very nature of the debate presupposes the failure of traditional biblical Christianity. Though there might be claims to philosophic neutrality and commitments to rationality, the reality is that the Christian God is rejected (or at least the fullness of his self-revelation) and argumentation follows from this presupposition. The problem of evil has ceased to be the confused cry of an afflicted child and has become the outraged cry of the “self.”

The study of the various attempts to address the problem of evil through the ages, whether as a defense or a theodicy,[4] is of much practical value for the church today, but there is also value in entering into the modern debate. It is with this latter goal in mind that we examine the work of C. S. Lewis on the problem of evil. It is worth asking, Why C. S. Lewis? Are there not more scholarly and more original thinkers on whom to focus our studies? Have not Augustine, Thomas, Leibniz, Kant, Swinburne, or Plantinga offered much better materials for study than a mere pop-theologian like Lewis?

C. S. Lewis is worth study for at least three reasons. First, his life adds an interesting dimension to his theodicy. He experienced loss, estrangement, and the horrors of modern war, not to mention physical pain, and the host of annoyances that eat at the soul. Lewis’s quest for meaning informed his theodicy. Lewis attempted to produce a rational theodicy but found that there is much more to the problem than reason. Plantinga called this the religious problem of evil (clearly differentiating this from either the logical or evidential formulations of the problem).[5] Feinberg, building on Plantinga’s distinction, wrote that “the religious problem of evil is not primarily about justifying God’s ways to man but about how one can live with this God.”[6] As a young man, Lewis adopted atheism, at least in part, because of his experience of pain, but he faced his most difficult trial not as an atheist but as a believer after the death of his wife. Lewis produced materials dealing with both the logical aspects as well as the emotive aspects of the problem of evil.

Second, Lewis was a prolific and diverse author. He produced apologetic works which focus heavily on the problem of evil (The Problem of Pain, Mere Christianity, The Abolition of Man), works of introspection which do the same (Surprised by Joy, A Grief Observed), numerous essays (e.g., Evil and God, The Weight of Glory), letters, poems (especially his early work Spirits in Bondage), and his works of fiction (especially The Chronicles of Narnia, The Space Trilogy, Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters) which, if not directly centered on the problem of evil, prominently feature the topic throughout. However, missing from this list is a scholarly treatise (which is perhaps why Lewis is not more quoted on the subject).[7] Far from being a weakness, the variety of Lewis’s materials illumines numerous aspects of the problem in ways that traditional academics alone might not. “Lewis does not work through the issues related to evil and suffering only once. Time after time, over and over, volume after volume, story after story, he comes at it first from this direction and then from that.”[8] Might not Augustine’s agonized confusion over the question, “Whence is evil?”[9] be helpfully illumined by Lewis’s imaginative perspective in The Magician’s Nephew?[10] Evil remains difficult to define and even more difficult to understand. The complexities of reality are best reflected by diversity, and Lewis provides it.

Third, Lewis remains an important author. Though not always held in high regard,[11] Lewis remains popular among Christians.[12] Even if there was little of worth in the works of Lewis, there would be value merely in understanding such a major influence on modern Christianity. In fact, many of Lewis’s works are immensely enjoyable, intelligently provocative, and deeply rewarding.[13] While we will find it necessary to reject or adjust various aspects of Lewis’s theodicy, we nevertheless can benefit greatly from his transcendent vision and his unique gift in conveying it; there is much we can learn from Lewis and much we can offer discerningly as well.

This article will divide into two main sections. The first section will examine how Lewis approached the logical problem of evil. The second section will focus on the so-called religious problem of evil. Throughout we will attempt accurately to present Lewis’s views, but will, when necessary, offer a critique from the Reformed perspective.

I. The Intellectual Problem of Evil

From all my lame defeats and oh! Much more
From all the victories that I seemed to score;
From cleverness shot forth on Thy behalf
At which, while angels weep, the audience laugh;
From all my proofs of Thy divinity,
Thou, who wouldst give no sign, deliver me.
Thoughts are but coins. Let me not trust, instead
Of Thee, their thin-worn image of Thy head.
From all my thoughts, even from my thoughts of Thee,
O thou fair Silence, fall, and set me free.
Lord of the narrow gate and needle’s eye,
Take from me all my trumpery lest I die.[14]

Lewis suggested that his purpose in writing The Problem of Pain was to “solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering” (as though that was some small task), but that he was unqualified “for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience” in suffering. Though Lewis believed himself better equipped to handle the intellectual rather than religious problems raised by the existence of suffering, he did not claim to offer original solutions: “I have believed myself to be restating ancient and orthodox doctrines. If any parts of the book are ‘original’, in the sense of being novel or unorthodox, they are so against my will and as a result of my ignorance.” While Lewis was confident in his answers, he nevertheless understood that his interaction with the problem of evil was a work in progress and was therefore provisional.[15] While he did not produce any major revisions of the views expressed in this early book, nor any additional apologetic works dealing specifically with the intellectual problem of evil, he consistently wrestled with the concept of evil throughout his writings. Whether imagining an unfallen world to contrast humanity’s “bentness” in Out of the Silent Planet,[16] or revealing the inanity of evil personified as the Un-man in Perelandra,[17] or declaring a world unseen preferable over this present darkness in The Silver Chair,[18] or seeking to redeem grief to serve sanctification in his letters to Sheldon Vanauken, or decrying the slide into subjectivism and the resultant destruction of character in The Abolition of Man,[19] the problem of evil lies just beneath the surface. This fact might suggest some special importance for Lewis or it might simply result from the integrated and holistic nature of Lewis’s thought. In either case, the problem of evil is a pervasive theme which extends far beyond his apologetic works. While no single work gives the entirety of his thought on any given subject, each lending nuance and perspective to the others, we can distill certain themes which can be useful both for understanding Lewis’s theodicy as well as for addressing the problem of evil in the pastoral context. We turn now to the first theme.

1. The World and the Problem of Evil

I am Nature, the Mighty Mother,
I am the law: ye have none other.
I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh,
I am the lust in your itching flesh.
I am the battle’s filth and strain,
I am the widow’s empty pain.
I am the sea to smother your breath,
I am the bomb, the falling death.
I am the fact and the crushing reason
To thwart your fantasy’s new-born treason.
I am the spider making her net,
I am the beast with jaws blood-wet.
I am a wolf that follows the sun
And I will catch him ere day be done.[20]

Lewis, in describing the central theme of his first published work, wrote that “nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.”[21] He came to this view early in life and it was a major reason for his acceptance of atheism. In his view, there was an “Argument from Undesign” which he later found reflected in the words of Lucretius: Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa.[22] Reality is cold and dark, it is indifferent, if not outright hostile, to humanity.[23] He struggled with this apparent meaninglessness, yet remained unable to escape from it or to silence his imagination and love of beauty. McInnis described this early dichotomy: “And so we see in Spirits in Bondage moments of impassioned blasphemy against the evil maker of an evil world. But at least as strong are the images of beauty and sublimity that Lewis creates—images that stand as a reaction to, or an escape from, the things his reason told him were true.”[24] This was not simply an aspect of a single poetic work, but was a consuming problem for Lewis. He wrote,

Such, then, was the state of my imaginative life; over against it stood the life of my intellect. The two hemispheres of my mind were in the sharpest contrast. On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’ Nearly all that I loved I believed to be imaginary; nearly all that I believed to be real I thought grim and meaningless. The exceptions were certain people (whom I loved and believed to be real) and nature herself. That is, nature as she appeared to the senses. I chewed endlessly on the problem: “How can it be so beautiful and also so cruel, wasteful and futile?” Hence at this time I could almost have said with Santayana, “All that is good is imaginary; all that is real is evil.”[25]

Upon his acceptance of Christianity his view of the world was modified to include a rational, intelligible, objective moral strand,[26] but he continued to see the world fundamentally as before. There was a fundamental disjunction between the physical world and the moral one. However, this is difficult to reconcile with the doctrines of creation (“it was very good”) and revelation (“the heavens declare the glory of God”). Perhaps he mistook biblical condemnation of the “world” as metaphysical instead of moral, or perhaps he never questioned a belief which was so deeply ingrained in his experience. Whatever the case, he failed to adjust his view of the world as much as Scripture seems to demand.

This duality in nature is important in understanding his theodicy. On the one hand the world appears cruel and yet, on the other, there is an inescapable moral law. We might be tempted to simply label his view as metaphysical evil, a flaw in reality which produces pain by necessity. However, we should be clear that Lewis considered and rejected monism (God is above good and evil and sends both indifferently upon his creation), dualism (equally ultimate good and evil), and naturalism (atheistic materialism). In his opinion, creation was good, but fallen. He did not consider this apparent cruelty to be a broken aspect of the world (humanity was bent, not the world). Instead, the indifferent harshness of the world served various purposes, the most important being that it is necessary to have a neutral medium to allow for human free will and the interaction of individual beings. According to Lewis,

Not even Omnipotence could create a society of free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and ‘inexorable’ Nature.… Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self-consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing), again demands the presence to the self of something other than the self.[27]

Lewis is not so much explaining the presence of natural evil as giving the context for what he assumes to be the greatest good: libertarian free will. On this view, the value of human free will is self-evident since God was willing to allow so much for its existence. If suffering is a byproduct of the necessary conditions for the greatest good, such pain is “justified.” In fact, apart from a tentative discussion of “Animal Pain,”[28] Lewis does not again address natural evil per se in The Problem of Pain, which suggests that in his mind, this contextual argument sufficiently justifies God’s creation of a world which includes suffering.[29]

Lewis simply assumes the self-evident value of free will.[30] According to this view, the value of human free will outweighs the potential (not necessarily the actual) “evils” which result from the requisite environmental conditions.[31] While not explicit, this view suggests that natural evil is somehow “necessary” to existence. At best, the biblical characterization of creation as “good” would need to be modified.

Human free will requires a neutral environment, and neutrality implies the impossibility of universal suitability. Lewis wrote, “If the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always, and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul, much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each member of a society.”[32] This position might lend credence to the charge that God is the source of evil (at least natural evil and its resultant suffering), so Lewis is quick to add that “this is very far from being an evil … but it certainly leaves the way open to a great evil.”[33] While his description of reality bears the mark of common sense (somewhat along the lines of “you can’t please everyone all the time”), it remains unclear why it is necessarily true. Why does the fixed nature of matter prevent its being “equally convenient and pleasurable”? There is no biblical evidence for this position nor is it logically necessary. It is an argument from experience, but one which conflicts with the biblical description of God’s good creation as well as the redeemed cosmos. According to the orthodox view of creation, the experience of sinful man of a cursed world is not normative.

If it was unclear what Lewis was explaining, he states his conclusion in no uncertain terms. This is a key feature in Lewis’s theodicy: “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 order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”[34] He goes on to appropriate and adjust Leibniz’s language: “Perhaps this is not the ‘best of all possible’ universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean only ‘worlds that God could have made, but didn’t.’ The idea of that which God ‘could have’ done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them.”[35]

Natural evil is an unfortunate, but necessary, feature of this world.[36] God is not complicit in evil because the greater good of free will requires the possibility of suffering, and the additional good of personal interaction requires a “neutral medium” in which to do it. According to Lewis, this does not infringe on God’s omnipotence because God cannot do the nonsensical. Since the creation of life—at least life in possession of free will—requires such a world, it is improper to argue from such a creation against God’s power.

We will look a bit closer at the divine attributes of omnipotence and goodness in the following section, but will make one final observation before moving on. Lewis masterfully conveyed a transcendent vision of reality. The universe, in all its cold beauty, points beyond itself. “A book on suffering which says nothing of heaven, is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the scale against the sufferings on earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one.”[37] Phillip Tallon wrote, “In essence, Lewis tries to give imaginative weight to the future glory the apostle Paul indicates. In doing so, Lewis helps to tip the scales of theodicy, not by introducing new ideas, but by helping us to value old ideas properly.”[38] We can see this almost everywhere in the writings of Lewis. The repeated refrain “further up and further in” from The Last Battle points the characters (and us) ever onward to Aslan’s land of which all other lands were a mere echo. In a less fantastic, but no less visionary, work Lewis wrote: “Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.”[39]

2. God and the Problem of Evil

Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.[40]

The problem of evil, at least the logical problem of evil, is formulated around two divine attributes: omnipotence and goodness. While the problem of suffering is universal (as Lewis wrote: “Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”[41]), the logical problem of evil is a specifically Christian problem. If either attribute is forfeited, the logical problem is removed, but the cost would unfortunately be orthodox Christianity—a price many are increasingly willing to pay.[42] It is partially the expectation of something more, the innate sense that things are not as they are supposed to be, which prompts humanity to question, but it is specifically the doctrinal claims by God himself which provide the mystery in which this logical problem can thrive.

Lewis does not dispute the Christian context for this debate, but he does suggest that the problem is exacerbated by the improper use of language. He wrote, “The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’, and perhaps also the term ‘happy’, are equivocal: for it must be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or only possible, meanings, then the argument is unanswerable.”[43] Lewis is most famous as a Christian apologist, but he was never more than an amateur at it (a gifted one used by God no doubt, but an amateur nevertheless). Here, by contrast, Lewis is drawing on his academic background to buttress his apologetic. He was, after all, in the business of words. In his work Studies in Words he wrote, “It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.”[44]

Omnipotence, for Lewis, was a term which deserved closer attention. He suggested that the popular misuse of the term amounted to nonsense.[45] He wrote,

Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can’. It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities … nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.… We ought to use great caution in defining those intrinsic impossibilities which even Omnipotence cannot perform. What follows is to be regarded less as an assertion of what they are than a sample of what they might be like.[46]

Following this observation, the remainder of his treatment of divine omnipotence revolves around the requirements of human free will (as was mentioned in the previous section). It is curious that after his comments on language, he does little to directly address omnipotence either doctrinally or linguistically. The reader is clearly meant to infer that the presence of evil does not compromise God’s omnipotence because evil is the result of free will (along with the required natural components). It is ironic that his defense of divine omnipotence is to suggest that part of his creation has libertarian free will. He might be correct that the possibility of evil being intrinsic in free will and a neutral external reality would excuse God for the existence of evil, but he fails to show how this maintains divine omnipotence as historically understood. This has to be considered a weak point in Lewis’s theodicy, as it is in all libertarian free will theodicies. Whatever else, omnipotence is incompatible with human independence.[47]

Divine goodness, like omnipotence, is in need of linguistic correction. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.…There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous.”[48] Lewis continued:

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. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring.… 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. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.[49]

A striking feature of this exposition of love is the theme of power which runs throughout. Lewis defended omnipotence by placing limits on it, but explains love by pointing to omnipotence.[50] In addition, God’s goodness is not only potent but purposeful; Lewis understood God’s goodness in terms of teleology.

3. Man and the Problem of Evil

Thou wilt not, though we asked it, quite recall
Free will once given. Yet to this moment’s choice
Give unfair weight. Hold me to this. Oh strain
A point—use legal fictions; for if all
My quarrelling selves must bear an equal voice,
Farewell, thou hast created me in vain.[51]

As we have seen, Lewis’s theodicy is centered on the concept of libertarian free will. This argument is not original to Lewis, neither was his formulation of it especially clever in presentation nor philosophically nuanced. In fact, it comes closer to an assumption than an argument: he will occasionally make it explicit, but more often than not free-will is the context for something else (nature, heaven, etc.). One such explicit summary: “Christianity asserts that God is good; that He made all things good and for the sake of their goodness; that one of the good things He made, namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included the possibility of evil, and that creatures, availing themselves of this possibility, have become evil.”[52] As important as this concept is to Lewis, he does not develop it with much sophistication.[53] We can identify several reasons why this is so. First, he seemed to believe that this was the position of orthodox Christianity. A concept generally agreed need not be dwelt upon. Second, this concept appeared self-evident to him. As we discussed, his view of the world was directly tied to human free will. And of course, free will resonated with his personality.

Lewis, therefore, was far more interested in moving past the fact of free will to the purposes which lie behind it. In a chapter of The Problem of Pain entitled “The Fall of Man,” Lewis summarizes the connection between free will and God’s purposes: “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.”[54] Lewis does little to avoid the usual criticism of libertarian free will (it compromises God’s omnipotence, it is not taught in Scripture, and it is psychologically problematic), but he does emphasize the centrality of man in the problem. Evil is not an esoteric metaphysical conception, sin is personal. Humanity fell. The problem of pain is the problem of sin, and Lewis points us in the right direction.

4. Purpose and the Problem of Evil

So; you have found an engine
Of injury that angels
Might dread. The world plunges,
Shies, snorts, and curvets like a horse in danger.
Then comfort her with fondlings,
With kindly word and handling,
But do not believe blindly
This way or that. Both fears and hopes are swindlers.
What’s here to dread? For mortals
Both hurt and death were certain
Already; our light-hearted
Hopes from the first sentenced to final thwarting.
This marks no huge advance in
The dance of Death. His pincers
Were grim before with chances
Of cold, fire, suffocation, Ogpu, cancer.
Nor hope that this last blunder
Will end our woes by rending
Tellus herself asunder –
All gone in one bright flash like driest tinder.
As if your puny gadget
Could dodge the terrible logic
Of history! No; the tragic
Road will go on, new generations trudge it.
Narrow and long it stretches,
Wretched for one who marches
Eyes front. He never catches
A glimpse of the fields each side, the happy orchards.[55]

“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.”[56] Lewis makes clear in this dramatic statement that pain, in the divine plan, has a redemptive purpose. There are at least three aspects to Lewis’s teleology. First, pain serves as a reminder that the world is not as it should be. “We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life.’ Life has never been normal.”[57] As we saw earlier, the world points to something beyond it; suffering prevents blind contentment. Second, pain is a call that the curse must be undone. “Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’—or else not. It is still ‘either-or’. If we insist on keeping Hell (or even Earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.”[58] Third, it is a “severe mercy.”[59] At times, specific evils were used either to prevent worse evil or produce a good which outweighed the specific evil. This is not to say that pain itself is good or that suffering itself is the blessing. Lewis clarified, “There is great good in bearing sorrow patiently: I don’t know that there is any virtue in sorrow just as such.”[60] Lewis here comes close to a felix culpa defense; however, he is careful to nuance his position. In keeping with his free will argument, evil was not necessary (it was man’s free choice), but was useful.

All the various results which Lewis highlights fit together to convey a common message: there is purpose in pain. It is not good in and of itself, but is used to accomplish good purposes.[61] This ought to be distinguished from greater good arguments. He is not claiming that evil, looked at in context, ceases to be evil. Nor is he saying that because good produces evil it is necessary for good. Nor is he saying that in the sum total of history good will outweigh bad and therefore we can call reality “good.” Lewis does not deny or diminish the reality of evil. Instead, he attempts to prove the basic point that evil is not beyond God’s plan, pain is not beyond redemption. Lewis, as he commonly does, refuses to remain abstract and esoteric. Evil is evil and good is good, and the whole is personal. God allows suffering for our good.

The symbol of a drama, a symphony, or a dance, is here useful to correct a certain absurdity which may arise if we talk too much of God planning and creating the world process for good and of that good being frustrated by the free will of the creatures. This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else—more ridiculously still—that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realized. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula. The world is a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces. The doctrine of the free Fall asserts that the evil which thus makes the fuel or raw material for the second and more complex kind of good is not God’s contribution but man’s. This does not mean that if man had remained innocent God could not then have contrived an equally splendid symphonic whole.[62]

II. The Religious Problem of Evil

Yet I will not bow down to thee nor love thee,
For looking in my own heart I can prove thee,
And know this frail, bruised being is above thee.
Our love, our hope, our thirsting for the right,
Our mercy and long seeking of the light,
Shall we change these for thy relentless might?
Laugh then and slay. Shatter all things of worth,
Heap torment still on torment for thy mirth—
Thou art not Lord while there are Men on earth.[63]

There is value in seeking to understand the diverse doctrines of revealed theology; we ought to strive for all that our created intellects can comprehend. However, the reality of suffering cannot be captured within a logical formulation—whether Christian or atheistic. Pain, and more deeply the evil of which pain is a part, is fundamentally irrational. It is wrong, it should not be, yet it is.

Scripture promises a better world, but, along with giving hope, this further reveals the current darkness. Whether the agonized cry of David, “How long O Lord,” or Job sitting in excruciating silence; the outrage of Jonah (“angry enough to die!”), or the tears of Christ—the presence of evil in this good (once and future) creation prompts a reaction which has little resemblance to logical inference. Pain is immediate; suffering cannot and need not be explained; it is experienced, lived, endured, overcome … or not.

Lewis was self-consciously a rationalist. He condemned the irrationality of subjectivism and naturalism; he believed that value and emotion reflect objective reality. His initial reaction to combat was not fear but the thought, “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about.”[64] It is hard to imagine a man more likely to find satisfaction in an intellectual theodicy. However, it is his personality that reveals the failure of logical theodicies alone to address actual suffering. Lewis’s life, and words, show that the problem of evil is often (and perhaps always) a non-reasoned reaction against an illogical reality. Rather than arguments, suffering requires compassion; evil is not primarily an intellectual problem, but an existential one. Lewis was, of course, fully aware of this: “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.”[65]

1. Emotion and the Problem of Evil

Out of the wound we pluck
The shrapnel. Thorns we squeeze
Out of the hand. Even poison forth we suck,
And after pain have ease.
But images that grow
Within the soul have life
Like cancer and, often cut, live on below
The deepest of the knife,
Waiting their time to shoot
At some defenceless hour
Their poison, unimpaired, at the heart’s root,
And, like a golden shower,
Unanswerably sweet,
Bright with returning guilt,
Fatally in a moment’s time defeat
Our brazen towers long-built;
And all our former pain
And all our surgeon’s care
Is lost, and all the unbearable (in vain
Borne once) is still to bear.[66]

Lewis was a brilliant thinker; he had the rare gift of linguistic competence to match the logical precision of his mind. However, Lewis tended to value the rational at the expense of the emotive. Habermas described Lewis’s view of emotion: “In matters of faith, our feelings ought to be mistrusted. And when the choice is between reason and emotions, we should always choose the former. These two forces regularly battle each other.”[67] Habermas perhaps overstates the dichotomy, but nevertheless rightly emphasizes Lewis’s internal struggle.

This distrust of emotion started early in his life. “From my earliest years I was aware of the vivid contrast between my mother’s cheerful and tranquil affection and the ups and downs of my father’s emotional life, and this bred in me long before I was old enough to give it a name a certain distrust or dislike of emotion as something uncomfortable and embarrassing and even dangerous.”[68] His distrust was intensified as he watched the decline and death of his mother to cancer. Her death set him adrift: “With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”[69] The pain of this loss also resulted in the permanent estrangement of father and son. Unfortunately, despite their estrangement, Lewis picked up from his father a sense that life is “incessant drudgery under continual threat of financial ruin.”[70] Over time, he developed “a settled expectation that everything would do what you did not want it to do.”[71] His firsthand experience of the cataclysm that was the Great War was not the shock it might have been, for he was already convinced that reality was cold and hard, but it served to reinforce what he already believed. He suffered both physical and emotional wounds, “my memories of the last war haunted my dreams for years.”[72] Lewis’s view of the world as full of cruelty and indifference was not a rational conclusion nor a scientific description; it developed out of an emotional reaction. This view of nature was a major aspect of his acceptance of atheism.[73] (We have seen that even after his conversion, it was so deeply ingrained that it was never seriously questioned.) The danger of the atheistic argument from evil is rarely, if ever, intellectual; it is a question of the heart.

The Christian life requires the training of the emotions as well as the mind and will; “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism.… In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment.”[74] Alongside the implications for Christian discipleship, this also suggests an important aspect of apologetics—we address the heart even when the problem appears academic. A Christian apologetic must be winsome and pastoral; while exposing lies and defending truth, it ought to challenge unspoken commitments and emotions, and beckon toward the light.

Lewis’s greatest trial, which is the most instructive, came not in his childhood home broken by cancer, not even during the nightmare of the trenches in WWI, but in finding love and then losing it to cancer. Grief was his greatest foe. Despite all his intelligence, his logical precision, his years of teaching, grief threatened to overwhelm him, to undo him. Lewis recorded aspects of his experience of suffering and published it under the title A Grief Observed.[75] It contains some musings vaguely reminiscent of Augustine in his Confessions, but more prominent are the outbursts, the attempts to put pain into words: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”[76] “Cancer, and cancer, and cancer. My mother, my father, my wife. I wonder who is next in the queue.”[77] “Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture. I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than thought.”[78] Even his attempts to reason were usually emotive expressions; a problem he recognized: “Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.”[79] Lewis recognized in himself the tendency to lash out when he was in pain. Short tempers and poor choices are common among those who suffer, but Lewis helps us to understand that even our thoughts themselves can be an emotional outburst: “All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back.”[80] Our thoughts can betray us; our reason might not be reasonable. Despite all Lewis’s work on the problem of pain, on the presence of evil, he could not find comfort in any of it.

Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? Aren’t all these notes the senseless writhings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? Who still thinks there is some device (if only he could find it) which will make pain not to be pain. It doesn’t really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist’s chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.[81]

We can trace a progression of sorts in A Grief Observed: the slowly diminishing anguish alongside a growth in understanding (or at least a diminishing of misunderstanding). What is significant for apologetics is that this growth in understanding is not academic—his struggle was acceptance, not knowledge; trust, not truth.[82] His initial reaction to grief was extreme, exposing doubts that bordered on despair. He wrote, “… go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once.”[83] His pessimistic perception of reality was now made concrete. Perhaps he had been right to begin with, perhaps he needed to return to the angst and anger of his early poems. In language suggestive of the themes we have discussed, Lewis wrote: “Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.… I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap.… What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, ‘good’? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it? We set Christ against it.”[84] While he continued to struggle with pain and the doubts which seemed beyond his control, the comparison to Christ is clearly a turning point in his book (and in his story of grief). He returned to the metaphor of God’s door, but this time with a different result. “When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of ‘No answer.’ It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze.

As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, ‘Peace, child; you don’t understand.’”[85] Finally, Lewis completed his journey to acceptance. He did not finally find peace because God’s ways were “justified” to him; like Job and generations of God’s people who cry out in pain, Lewis did not receive all the answers he desired. Instead, he came to rest in God’s love, his goodness. Faith, hope, and love proved to be far more helpful in justifying God than any arguments. He wrote:

But I mustn’t, because I have come to misunderstand a little less completely what a pure intelligence might be, lean over too far. There is also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least. Didn’t people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions.[86]

Confusion and faith are not mutually exclusive. Neither are suffering and grace.

2. Aesthetics and the Problem of Evil

Ask not if it’s god or devil,
Brethren, lest your words imply
Static norms of good and evil
(As in Plato) throned on high;
Such scholastic, inelastic,
Abstract yardsticks we deny.
Far too long have sages vainly
Glossed great Nature’s simple text;
He who runs can read it plainly,
‘Goodness = what comes next.’
By evolving, Life is solving
All the questions we perplexed.
Oh then! Value means survival –
Value. If our progeny
Spreads and spawns and licks each rival,
That will prove its deity
(Far from pleasant, by our present,
Standards, though it well may be).[87]

There is one final aspect of Lewis’s theodicy which should be mentioned: aesthetics. Every important aspect of Lewis’s life and thought had a strong aesthetic component: the cold cruel beauty of the cosmos, the ineffable longing he labeled “joy,” the romance of story and the resonance of myth, the vision of glory, and the “dance”[88] of creation and eternity. Beauty is not a frivolity or mere subjective delight, but the deepest desire and ultimate goal of humanity. “We do not want to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”[89] Beauty, for Lewis, mattered.

We will briefly mention two aspects of aesthetics in Lewis’s apologetics. First, beauty was an aspect of method. “It is Lewis’s imaginative work that presents his best and most readable confession of the gospel. Lewis seeks to do for his readers what the writer George MacDonald did for him: to baptize our imaginations, thus enabling us to see the world through the lenses of Christian faith.”[90] That which most resonated with Lewis while he clung to atheism was the beauty of the world; so too what is most convincing in his works is his presentation of beauty. Whether imagined worlds, his evocative language itself, or stirring images of transcendence, Lewis intended (and often accomplished) to present not only truth, but beauty.

The second pertinent aspect is his use of aesthetic metaphor as a part of his theodicy itself.[91] Lewis wrote, “Divine reality is like a fugue. All His acts are different, but they all rhyme or echo to one another.”[92] Tallon, in commenting on this aesthetic theme in Lewis, wrote: “For Lewis, dynamic and evolving artworks help us to see that God has the ability to incorporate change, even rebellion and sin, into a beautiful whole.”[93] Use of art as a metaphor in theodicy can be found as far back as Augustine, but Lewis’s use of aesthetic metaphors should not too quickly be reduced to Augustine’s harmony argument or Leibniz’s best possible world theodicy. It is common, when seeking to understand evil in terms of artistic expression, to collapse evil into good—a danger which neither Augustine nor Leibniz was completely able to avoid.[94]

Somehow, evil in microcosm ceases to be evil when seen in macrocosm. This proves problematic both biblically (Scripture is clear and unequivocal in its condemnation of evil as unnatural and horrific) and experientially (do we not know that pain is unpleasant and the holocaust was a tragedy—could there be a perspective from which this is not true?). Instead, Lewis did not allow this metaphor to compromise the “sinfulness of sin”; evil was not transformed into good, it was used for good.

It is significant that Lewis closed his treatment of the problem of pain with the metaphor of dance. A book which was philosophic and theological in nature, a book of explicit apologetic intent, concludes in aesthetic metaphor.

All pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it.[95]

III. Summary and Conclusion

Reading C. S. Lewis is a rewarding endeavor. His grasp of language, his transcendent vision, and his clear faith combine to produce works which are enriching both in method and material. The same should be said specifically about his work on the problem of evil. While not without flaw, the study of Lewis’s treatment of this topic is worth the effort. There is much that can be learned about apologetics and theodicy, despite the occasional theological weaknesses (Lewis repeatedly declared that he was not a theologian so perhaps we can forgive his lack of precision). Let us briefly summarize the salient features.

First, if this has not been evident from Lewis’s words, we should make clear that his theodicy is the conscious attempt to unfold the implications of certain key biblical texts. In particular, we should mention Rom 8 and 2 Cor 4: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God.”[96] “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”[97] “So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”[98] We might debate Lewis’s accuracy in explicating or accuracy in applying these passages, or we might find that much of his material illumines these biblical themes in wonderful ways, but either way we should be driven back to Scripture as we think through issues of suffering.

Second, Lewis consistently emphasizes that the ultimate solution to the problem of pain is faith, not sight. The greatest need is not academic proofs, but care for the soul. He indeed saw the value of apologetic argumentation and spent much of his life engaged in that activity. However, at the end of the day, he understood that it was about acceptance and trust, rather than knowledge and understanding, for it is trust which endures through the pain.[99]

Third, he understood that truth, goodness, and beauty were divine. Not only were they reminders of transcendence, but they were instances of it. That is to say, they were more ultimate than pain. Pain would fade “almost out of sight” and we would partake of the beauty for which we longed. The moral and aesthetic qualities of reality were both more ancient and longer lived than evil.

Fourth, we see that the problem of evil does not have a single answer. Just as Scripture includes narrative, poetry, and instruction—which all combine to give a single, though multifaceted, truth—so too Lewis’s approach to the problem of evil involved many different approaches and perspectives. Lewis was at his best in imaginative storytelling or transcendent poetics, and these were informed by his careful logic and appropriation of orthodox traditions. Lewis reveals the importance of a multifaceted approach to apologetics, an approach which is perhaps even more pertinent today given the current interest in narrative.[100]

Fifth, Lewis adopted the libertarian free will argument to explain the origin of evil. He did not consider, apparently, the compatibilist position of the Reformed tradition and therefore falls prey to the common criticisms. In particular, he is forced to compromise the omnipotence of God. This he did inconsistently as he still had a theological commitment to that doctrine. Much of what he wrote confirms that God is in control—whether it was God “closing in on him” at his conversion and the resultant “compulsion,” or God’s ability to overcome evil for good, Lewis was consistently confident in God’s control. Although we must reject Lewis’s treatment of free will as insufficient, we should still recognize that Lewis was right to put human sin front and center in the problem of evil. This problem is not an abstraction, it is personal. The reality is that it is far more comfortable to discuss the problem of evil than to discuss the problem of sin. As G. K. Chesterton wrote, “What’s wrong with the world? I am.”

Notes

1. From “In Prison” in C. S. Lewis, Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (London: Heinemann, 1919), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2003/2003-h/2003-h.htm.
2. Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross: An Analytical Look at the Problem of Pain (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic & Professional, 2005), 9.
3. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 244. “A sense of sin is almost totally lacking.… We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists’, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world” (p. 95).
4. Plantinga differentiates between a defense (which seeks to show that arguments against theism fail) and a theodicy (which, in the words of Milton, seeks to justify the ways of God to man). A defense seeks to show that the problem of evil does not disprove God, while theodicy has the more positive goal of explaining why God allows evil. See Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1977), 10. Cf. John Frame, “The Problem of Evil,” in Suffering and the Goodness of God, ed. Christopher W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 144.
5. Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil, 63. “Faced with great personal suffering or misfortune, he may be tempted to rebel against God, to shake his fist in God’s face, or even to give up belief in God altogether.… Such a problem calls, not for philosophical enlightenment, but for pastoral care” (ibid.).
6. John S. Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil: Theological Systems and the Problem of Evil, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 321.
7. N. D. Wilson comically noted such academic snobbery when, after gaining philosophic insight from a book in the Chronicles of Narnia, he wrote that “as children’s fiction isn’t quite academically respectable, I’ll pretend that I learned this from Blaise Pascal” (N. D. Wilson, Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World [Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009], 77). Cf. Philip Tallon, “Evil and the Cosmic Dance,” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty, ed. David J. Baggett, Gary R. Habermas, and Jerry L. Walls (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008), 199: “That Lewis’s theodicy is often ignored is no doubt partly due to the fact that he defends orthodox views, most of which are represented elsewhere in the literature. But what is not easy to find elsewhere is the panoramic and yet unified vision of reality that Lewis possesses.”
8. Jerry Root, C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil: An Investigation of a Pervasive Theme, Princeton Theological Monograph Series 96 (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2009), 244.
9. St. Augustine, The Confessions of Saint Augustine, trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image, 1960), see esp. Book 7.
10. “‘Narnia is established. We must next take thought for keeping it safe. I will call some of you to council.… We must talk together. For though the world is not five hours old an evil has entered it.’ The creatures he named came forward and he turned away eastward with them. The others all began talking, saying things like ‘What did he say had entered the world?—A Neevil?—What’s a Neevil? No, he didn’t say a Neevil, he said a weevil—Well, what’s that?’” (C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew, 1st ed., 23rd printing [New York: Collier Books, 1955], 119–20).
11. Harold Bloom, e.g., wrote, “The energies of C. S. Lewis were as intense as his learning was profound, and his co-religionists will maintain his public reputation for another generation or so. But he is neither an original thinker nor a canonical writer, and inflating his value will not enhance his ultimate status” (Harold Bloom, ed., C. S. Lewis [New York: Chelsea House, 2006], 3). Lee D. Rossi, on the other hand, wrote in the same collection, “Those who have written about Lewis have not been wrong in appraising the virtues of his writing. There is general agreement that he is at his best when creating imaginary worlds full of wonder and whimsy” (Lee D. Rossi, “Logic and Romance: The Divided Self of C. S. Lewis,” 67).
12. In 2013, U.S. sales of Mere Christianity topped 150,000 copies, while total sales have surpassed 18 million. The Chronicles of Narnia have sold almost 10 million. The majority of his works remain in print and enjoy global sales in the millions annually. Lewis is also the subject of a growing field of secondary works. See Lynn Garrett, “Events, Books Honor C. S. Lewis 50 Years After His Death,” http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/59760-events-books-honor-c-s-lewis-50-years-after-his-death.html; John Blake, “The C. S. Lewis You Never Knew,” http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/01/the-c-s-lewis-you-never-knew/; Emma Koonse, “Exploring C. S. Lewis’s Lasting Popularity—52 Years After His Death,” http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/68356-exploring-c-s-lewis-s-lasting-popularity-52-years-after-his-death.html.
13. As an example, the short sermon The Weight of Glory provides a view of transcendence which illumines the present as well as the future, while weaving together themes of ethics and aesthetics throughout. Another example is The Chronicles of Narnia, which have been a pleasure to read and a delight to my children. They are both imaginative and theologically robust.
14. “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer” in C. S. Lewis, Poems (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co, 1992), 129.
15. See, e.g., Root, C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil, 60–64. Cf. Clyde S. Kilby, The Christian World of C. S. Lewis (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 70.
16. “Oyarsa, I may tell you that our world is very bent” (C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet [New York: Scribner, 2003], 120). This contrast is extended in Perelandra. Cf. Dabney Adams Hart, “The Power of Language,” in C. S. Lewis, 52: “The literal meaning of ‘bent’ makes its metaphorical sense much more precise and powerful than the vague term ‘evil.’” Donald T. Williams, Mere Humanity: G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien on the Human Condition (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2006), 73: “Ransom gets many opportunities to grow in his understanding of the human condition by seeing the contrast between what we are and what we might have been.”
17. “If the attack had been of some more violent kind it might have been easier to resist. What chilled and almost cowed him was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared: but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school.… Again and again he felt that a suave and subtle Mephistopheles with red cloak and rapier and a feather in his cap, or even a somber tragic Satan out of Paradise Lost, would have been a welcome release from the thing he was actually doomed to watch. It was not like dealing with a nasty politician at all: it was more like being set to guard an imbecile or a monkey or a very nasty child” (C. S. Lewis, Perelandra [New York: Macmillan, 1968], 123, 128).
18. “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one.… I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it. I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia” (C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair [New York: Collier Books, 1970], 159). In a similar way, Lewis suggests that even if heaven were a lie he would prefer to die on the side of what is good. “Would not you and I take the Viking way: ‘The Giants and Trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin’” (C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer [New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964], 120). Cf. Jeff McInnis, Shadows and Chivalry: C. S. Lewis and George MacDonald on Suffering, Evil, and Goodness, Studies in Christian History and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007), 148–54.
19. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful” (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: Or, Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools [New York: Harper Collins, 2001], 26). Cf. C. S. Lewis, “The Poison of Subjectivism,” in The Seeing Eye and Other Selected Essays from Christian Reflections (New York: Ballantine, 1986), 99: “Correct thinking will not make good men of bad ones; but a purely theoretical effort may remove ordinary checks to evil and deprive good intentions of their natural support.”
20. “Satan Speaks” in Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, I.
21. C. S. Lewis and Walter Hooper, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2004), 1:397.
22. “Had God designed the world, it would not be a world so frail and faulty as we see” (C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966], 65).
23. “All stories will come to nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and evil, or else an evil spirit” (C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, rev. ed. [San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015], 3).
24. McInnis, Shadows and Chivalry, 21.
25. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 170. Cf. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, rev. ed. (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015), 29: “We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds.… The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking that God is ‘good’ in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic. There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails.”
26. “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are” (Lewis, Abolition of Man, 18). “Unless we judge this waste and cruelty to be real evils we cannot of course condemn the universe for exhibiting them. Unless we take our own standard of goodness to be valid in principle (however fallible our particular applications of it) we cannot mean anything by calling waste and cruelty evils. And unless we take our own standard to be something more than ours, to be in fact an objective principle to which we are responding, we cannot regard that standard as valid. In a word, unless we allow ultimate reality to be moral, we cannot morally condemn it” (Lewis, “De Futilitate,” in The Seeing Eye, 95.
27. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 19–20.
28. “The problem of animal suffering is appalling … because the Christian explanation of human pain (i.e. free will resulting in moral evil) cannot be extended to animal pain” (ibid., 132). Cf. Lewis, “Vivisection,” in God in the Dock, 225: “For it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this. Thus all the factors which render pain more tolerable or make it less totally evil in the case of human beings will be lacking in the beasts.”
29. Root suggests that Lewis simply ignored the topic of natural evil rather than assuming it away as I here propose. “Lewis neglects to address the more foundational issue of natural evil. Consequently, his argument reveals a weakness” (C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil, 79). However, Lewis clearly identified the issue in other places: “Flaws in character do cause suffering; but bombs and bayonets, cancer and polio, dictators and roadhogs, fluctuations in the value of money or in employment, and mere meaningless coincidence, cause a great deal more. Tribulation falls on the integrated and well adjusted and prudent as readily as on anyone else.… There is no grandeur and no finality. Real sorrow ends neither with a bang nor a whimper” (C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012], 77–78).
30. Perhaps he so readily adopted this view at least in part from personal preference. “I had always wanted, above all things, not to be ‘interfered with.’ I had wanted (mad wish) ‘to call my soul my own’” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 228).
31. “Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having…. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.… If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will … then we may take it, it is worth paying” (Lewis, Mere Christianity, 48).
32. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 23.
33. Ibid., 24.
34. Ibid., 25.
35. Ibid., 26.
36. “Lewis’s conclusion, then, is not that gratuitous natural evils are necessary … but that it is necessary that gratuitous natural evil be possible” (Michael L. Peterson, “C. S. Lewis on the Necessity of Gratuitous Evil,” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher, 189).
37. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 148.
38. Tallon, “Evil and the Cosmic Dance,” 202.
39. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2001), 42.
40. From “Footnote to all Prayers” in Lewis, Poems, 129.
41. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 90.
42. Theologians as diverse as Clark Pinnock, Brian McLaren, and Roger E. Olson all limit God’s absolute sovereignty in various ways. Joel Osteen and William P. Young (author of The Shack), on a more popular level, likewise reject the doctrine of sovereignty as traditionally understood. Osteen’s books have topped the New York Times Best Seller list, and The Shack has sold upwards of ten million copies as well as spawning a feature film. Broadly defined, these authors all fall under the umbrella of evangelicalism.
43. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 16.
44. C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 6. Cf. Hart, “Power of Language,” 55: “The right words, according to Lewis, are more likely to be those of the poet than those of the philosopher, because poetic language is closest to original meaning.”
45. I am reminded here of a line from the movie The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” (speaking of the word “inconceivable”). Perhaps comedic movies, like the Narnia books, are not respectable academic sources, but it does offer insight into the comedic results of misusing words.
46. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 18.
47. While allowing for poetic license, Lewis as least hints at inconsistency as he describes his own conversion. He spoke of God “closing in” on him, that he chose to submit to God “yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite,” and that “the hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation” (Surprised by Joy, 224–29).
48. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 32.
49. Ibid., 39–40.
50. Ibid., 27: “The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower.”
51. From “Legion” in Lewis, Poems, 119.
52. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 63.
53. For more robust treatments of libertarian free will, see Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will and Confessions; Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil; Richard Swinburne, Providence and the Problem of Evil; Stephen T. Davis, Encountering Evil. Plantinga in particular should be referenced. His rigorous logic produces probably the best presentation of libertarianism. His concept of transworld depravity is an excellent contrast for the simplicity of Lewis’s theodicy. For good critiques of libertarian free will, see John Feinberg, The Many Faces of Evil; John Hick, Evil and the God of Love. Feinberg is a compatibilist whereas Hick produces a theodicy of “soul making,” a term also used by Lewis.
54. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 85.
55. “On the Atomic Bomb” in Lewis, Poems, 64.
56. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 91.
57. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 49. Cf. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2015): “One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.”
58. C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), viii.
59. Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009), 210.
60. Ibid., 189.
61. We might be reminded of Nietzsche’s famous line: “He who has a why can bear any how.” Victor Frankl too was fond of this saying, and the idea was central to his psychiatric approach (logotherapy). See Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 2006).
62. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 80.
63. From “De Profundis” in Lewis, Spirits in Bondage, XII.
64. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 196.
65. Lewis, Problem of Pain, xii.
66. “Relapse” in Lewis, Poems, 103.
67. Gary R. Habermas, “C. S. Lewis and Emotional Doubt,” in C. S. Lewis as Philosopher, 105.
68. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 4. Cf. “The emotional impact of evil and suffering misguided him in his younger years.… In the years following his conversion, the emotional struggles of his past enhanced his rhetorical ability, enabling him to connect with his readers, who also surely struggled” (Root, C. S. Lewis and a Problem of Evil, 60).
69. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 21.
70. Ibid., 23.
71. Ibid., 64.
72. C. S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. W. H. Lewis (San Diego: Harvest Books, 2003), 166.
73. “I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world” (Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 115).
74. “Lewis, Abolition of Man, 24.
75. “While Pain is perhaps a masterpiece of Christian thoughtfulness, it simply does not do well alone. It desperately needs the emotive, subjective dimension to the problem Lewis provides in A Grief Observed” (Robert W. Wall, “The Problem of Observed Pain: A Study of C. S. Lewis on Suffering,” JETS 26 [1983]: 444).
76. Lewis, Grief Observed, 3.
77. Ibid., 12.
78. Ibid., 30.
79. Ibid., 36.
80. Ibid., 40.
81. Ibid., 33.
82. “Bereavement forces us to try to believe what we cannot feel, that God is our true Beloved” (Ann Loades, “The Grief of C. S. Lewis,” ThTo 46 (1989): 275.
83. Lewis, Grief Observed, 6. Many have suggested that Lewis had a crisis of faith (so he did!) which resulted in disbelief. All the evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Lewis, if he is to be believed, explicitly said that he never left his faith, yet struggled with the doubts which arise in emotional outbursts. He wrote, “Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer’” (ibid., 7).
84. Ibid., 29.
85. Ibid., 69. The problem, he had found, was not with God’s silence, but with his own ignorance. God’s silence was not because he was cruel, but because he was patient, letting Lewis vent emotional outbursts of nonsense. “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask—half our great theological and metaphysical problems—are like that.”
86. Ibid., 75.
87. From “Evolutionary Hymn” in Lewis, Poems, 55.
88. Tallon wrote, “Throughout his work [The Problem of Pain], Lewis returns often enough to the image of the dance such that it rises above the level of metaphor, to take on the status of a model, or even paradigm” (“Evil and the Cosmic Dance,” 209).
89. Lewis, Weight of Glory, 43. He continued, “When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.”
90. Ralph C. Wood, “The Baptized Imagination: C. S. Lewis’s Fictional Apologetics,” ChrCent 112 (1995): 813.
91. “By cutting out beauty, we cut out theodicy’s heart” (Tallon, “Evil and the Cosmic Dance,” 209).
92. Lewis, God in the Dock, 37.
93. Tallon, “Evil and the Cosmic Dance,” 209.
94. “To you, nothing whatsoever is evil, and not only to you but also to your whole creation, for outside of it there is nothing that can break in and disrupt the order that you have imposed upon it. Among its parts, certain things are thought to be evil because they do not agree with certain others. Yet these same beings agree with others still, and thus they are good, and they are also good in themselves” (St. Augustine, Confessions, 172).
95. Lewis, Problem of Pain, 159.
96. Rom 8:18–19 ESV.
97. Rom 8:28 ESV.
98. 2 Cor 4:16–18 ESV.
99. He combined these approaches, showing love through truth. Take, e.g., Vanauken’s words: “C. S. Lewis was to be the friend in my loss and grief, the one hand in mine as I walked through a dark and desolate night. Other friends gave me love, and it was a fire to warm me. But Lewis was the friend I needed, the friend who would go with me down to the bedrock of meaning. I told him the insights that came to me through my grief observed—the title of the book he would write on his own future bereavement—and he gave me not only love but wisdom and understanding and, when necessary, severity” (Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, 185).
100. N. D. Wilson is an example of one who consciously follows in this model (in particular singling out Lewis and G. K. Chesterton as influential). His book Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl: Wide-Eyed Wonder in God’s Spoken World weaves together story, philosophy, theology, and a great deal of humor. He uses the author metaphor, among others, to answer the problem of evil. A less humorous discussion of the same metaphor can be found in Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 315–54 (see esp. 322). Cf. John M. Frame, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2013), 298–99. Frame adds nuance to this metaphor by suggesting that there is moral significance to the metaphysical difference between God as author and man as actor.