The Medicine Found in Pain: Insights from C.S. Lewis
By Emma Restuccia
Pain is not the word with which anyone would like to begin the New Year, especially after last year. As much as we’d like to start fresh and leave the wounds of the past behind, pain is an inexorable part of life, and perhaps it is best that it is. Suffering should be on our minds this year. In fact, I posit this year should be a study and a practice in pain. Here’s why.
The great Oxford and Cambridge don and Narnian imaginative C.S. Lewis explores this ageless moral quandary in his book, The Problem of Pain, and his wisdom in this work will be the basis of many thoughts set down here. While writing from a Christian, rather than specifically Catholic perspective, Lewis’ insights into tribulation provide both a basis and a solid philosophical understanding for reconciling the problem of pain with a benevolent God.
I begin by echoing Lewis’ sentiment, who warns the reader it is much easier to write about pain than to suffer it, easier to talk the talk then walk the walk. “All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the author,” he writes. “You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I will tell you; I am a great coward… I am not arguing that pain is not painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made ‘perfect through suffering’ is not incredible.”
But we can take Lewis’ word for it that he did indeed walk the pain-ridden walk. The Problem of Pain is one of Lewis’ relatively earlier works, written in 1940 in the midst of the tragedies of the Second World War. Little did Lewis know the subsequent years would indeed be agonizing to him––he would lose his wife to cancer in 1960.
Beginning with a broad philosophical look at Christianity, the origins of religion, the nature of God’s omnipotence and goodness, and man’s free will and human wickedness, Lewis then narrows down the problem in question. If the God of Christianity is good, how is there pain? How did misery enter a perfect world? Why do good people suffer? And why does Hell exist? Lewis asks: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both. This is the problem of pain in its simplest form.”
In brief, man’s abuse of his free will, given as the gift of God, allowed for sin to enter the world. Because of love, which by its essence requires freedom to love, God gave his creatures the will to choose Him or not Him. “The freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose,” Lewis says. And by that choice, man sinned and fell from the paraisal condition to one one of misery. Remedial correction was needed to restore man from false self sufficiency to divine reliance, from selfishness to self gift.
Pain then proposes two responses: “God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless,” Lewis writes. Tribulation opens the eyes of our remaking in the eternal choice between redemption or damnation. It shatters the illusion that happiness is found in the passing things of the world. “Pain insists upon being attended to,” Lewis potently writes. “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” Like Flannery O’Connor, who used the grotesque in her writing “because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear,” pain has the potential to call mankind out of monotony and mediocrity into sublimity and otherworldliness.
Not a good in itself, pain, as Lewis puts it, provides the opportunity for amendment and “plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul.” It is of value for what it teaches and where it directs. Suffering guides the soul to regain self surrender and obedience and in “grevious pain” “render[s] back the will which we have so long claimed for our own.” For Lewis and the Christian, both pleasure and pain are part of the earthly experience.
But the pleasures found here fail fully to satisfy, Lewis argues. “The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy,” Lewis writes. “The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe, or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.” The restlessness of pain on earth forces us to consider that security and true rest are found only in heaven.
Indeed, heaven is where Lewis completes his book, as a hard look at suffering would be incomplete without it. The desire for heaven, Lewis says, “summons you away from the self.” Mirrored in the Trinity, self sacrifice and communion define heaven, “a continual self- abandonment - an opening, an unveiling, a surrender.” Christ’s death on the cross was His ultimate example of outpouring and obedience, and in eternity, He, along with the Father and the Holy Ghost, perpetually offer themselves in self-gift in their communion of persons. It is in this perpetual outpouring of love and self of the Blessed Trinity that all are called to share in heaven.
Reflecting on the trials of the last year prompts us to look ahead at the coming year and the afflictions it too shall hold. But this suffering should be embraced, when it inevitably comes, rather than rejected and fled from. For the problem of pain reminds us of our dependence on Christ.
Pain, then, while posing a problem, also paradoxically shows itself as the remedy. It is the medicine that enables us to be fully alive and conformed to Christ, to become who we were created to be. As our time-bound journey takes us into a new year again, let us welcome and hold this problem––or solution––of pain in our hearts and minds as we trudge on toward our destination, not here, but beyond.
