This paper was written in partial fulfillment of English 401, C. S. Lewis: the Legacy of His Poetic Impulse, at Montreat College in Spring 1997. Brenda Erikson retains copyright privileges; those wishing to use material from this essay may do so as long as Brenda Erikson is given appropriate recognition.

Brenda Erikson

May 2, 1997

Don W. King

C. S. Lewis' non-fiction writings are typically very logical, straightforward, and lacking much emotional expression. His analytical mind picks an issue apart, gives a clear outline of the main arguments, and gives solid, well-thought-out support to his opinions. Some of his most popular books are those which explain his standpoints on particular issues, such as The Problem of Pain and God in the Dock. Christians all over the world today read Lewis' work to gain his perspective on divisive issues, and it may be interesting to note that many of his beliefs about difficult issues (abortion, theology, and the like) are similar to the conclusions that have been reached by many of today's conservative Christians; I would venture to say that while Lewis reached his conclusions by logical means, many of our Christian leaders may have reached their conclusions by simply inheriting the thoughts of others who went before them. Lewis' logic can be a breath of fresh air in a world that often tries to appeal solely to the emotionality of the masses. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis' account of his life from childhood to conversion, he gives the reader some insight into his staunch intellectualism:

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 (4).

Having grown up in such an emotionally confusing atmosphere, it is easy to see why Lewis became such a logical thinker.

However, there are times in every person's life in which s/he can no longer accept the worldview with which she/he has become comfortable. Sometimes circumstances occur that shake our beliefs to the very core, and our experiences are difficult to reconcile with our beliefs. The Oklahoma City bombing is one such example; how could a loving God allow innocent people to die at the hands of a sick person? In The Problem of Pain, Lewis would have taken a very logical, although not unsympathetic, approach to that type of situation, saying that we as humans have the power to choose what our actions will be. We are all sinful and therefore all are very capable of hurting one another. The blame for the Oklahoma City bombing, for example, can be focused on one person. What happens when there is no one to blame? What happens in the case of illness, as in Lewis' beloved wife Joy? Surely she did nothing that she knew would cause herself to be stricken with cancer. What kind of God would allow this kind of completely undeserved suffering to end a life? Lewis' response to this question in A Grief Observed is much more emotional, much more personal, and much closer to home than in The Problem of Pain. However, his picture of God remains intact, but expands to include the characteristics of grief and suffering. He is able to reconcile his image of a loving God with his experience of losing Joy after being married for a few short years. Lewis steps out of his protected and predictable shell of logic and asks questions that have no answers. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the results of Lewis' personal reckoning with the problem of pain, and to discuss his image of God which remains consistent throughout all his experiences as a Christian.

When Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940, he had encountered such tragedies as the death of his mother, serving in World War One, and the death of his father, respectively. All of these were doubtless emotionally taxing, and Lewis was a believer during only the death of his father; he was quite young when his mother passed away, and had not yet encountered the Lord "face to face" while he was in the war.

When Lewis' mother died, he was between the ages of six and eight; these are tender years in which a boy needs his mother to care for him. He describes crying out for his mother one night because he wasn't feeling well; she did not come to comfort him because she herself was dying of cancer and unable to help her son. Lewis says of this experience,

For us boys the real bereavement had happened before our mother died. We lost her gradually as she was gradually withdrawn from our life into the hands of nurses and delirium and morphia, and as our whole existence changed into something alien and menacing, as the house became full of strange smells and midnight noises and sinister conversations...It divided us from our father as well as our mother. (Joy 19)

Lewis had, as a boy, prayed for his mother's recovery while she was still sick, and for her resurrection after she had passed away; neither occurred, and he began to believe that God had failed in His job as a "magician." He says, "The thing [prayer] hadn't worked, but I was used to things not working, and I thought no more about it (Joy 20-21)." I find it difficult to believe that Lewis thought no more about it; in fact, I can really see his mother's death as a reason for his later atheism. Through his experience Lewis learned that his mother would no longer be around the house; he also learned that his father could not be depended upon, because the man could not deal with his grief in a healthy way. He also learned that God was not to be depended upon to answer prayer. I wonder what these experiences did to Lewis' childhood image of God as a Father; "either God is literally absent, like Mother, or emotionally unavailable, like Father; at best, He is a very poor magician," the young Lewis may have thought to himself. God allowed pain and suffering and seemed not to care whom they afflicted.

Lewis' war experiences are another avenue in which we can see how tragedy affected his images of God. In Surprised by Joy, he speaks about losing his friends in the war, as well as of the horrors of the battlefield: "Familiarity both with the very old and the very recent dead confirmed that view of corpses which had been formed the moment I saw my dead mother...[other images of war were] the frights, the cold, the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses...(196)." How easy it must have been for the atheist Lewis to continue to believe that in such wretchedness there was no benevolent God who cared about him or about anyone else.

He does not mention any differences in his views about death before and after his conversion in Surprised by Joy, although he does write that "my father's death...does not really come into the story I am telling (215)." To a human services major, this sounds very much like denial, particularly in light of all he writes about his father earlier in the book; Lewis' desire to stick to the logical story line and the matters of discussion at hand seems to prevent him from expressing grief, or at doing so in the very real way he does in A Grief Observed. Maybe his father's death didn't enter much into Lewis' faith development, which is the focus of Surprised by Joy; however, it is difficult for me to think that it had little or no effect -- that it was not worth spending a few sentences on in a book. One thing Lewis does say about his relationship with his father in Surprised by Joy is that he and his father had, at best, a very superficial relationship. When it came to matters of depth or importance, he says, "...it was one of the attempts I often made to break through the artificiality of our intercourse and admit him to my real life. It was a total failure (183)."

It is fairly obvious to those who have read a significant amount of Lewis and know something of his life that losing his wife, Joy, was the situation that really made him examine his faith and his beliefs about the character of God. Whereas the fundamental question of The Problem of Pain is, "Can a God who allows suffering be good?", the bottom-line questions of A Grief Observed seems to be, "What kind of God are You who will take away the one I love? And when will this pain be over? Where is Your mercy?" When loss hit him hard, Lewis was able to admit that he questioned God's goodness (although he did so at first under a pseudonym -- Lewis must not have wanted to unnecessarily shake the faiths of his readers by admitting to having these difficult questions about God. Also, A Grief Observed reveals much more of Lewis' emotional and "heart-led" side, which he may have wanted to keep at a distance from the general public, and understandably so.). I personally wonder about the character of a God who could take everything a person had away from him/her, and then come back and ask for more; Lewis says this about such hardships in The Problem of Pain: "We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character (42)." He also makes the statement, "There's always a card in His hand we didn't know about (Grief 78)." Is God elusive? Yes. But does God intend for us to be tripped up on His mystery? I would prefer to believe not. I think most Christians would agree with the fact that God is shaping us into the people whom He wants us to become, and that He often does use the difficulties we encounter in life as a means to refine our spirits. Lewis talks about the function of pain as God's way of getting our attention focused on Himself: "While what we call 'our own life' remains agreeable we will not surrender it to Him (Pain 96)." However, in A Grief Observed, Lewis has this to say about his own spiritual integrity and about God's part in these trials:

And all this time I may, once more, be building with cards. And if I am He will once more knock the building flat. He will knock it down as often as proves necessary. Unless I have to be finally be given up as hopeless, and left building pasteboard palaces in Hell forever, 'free among the dead.'...Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us.

What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, 'No toffee now. But when you've grown up and don't really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose?' (78-80)

I doubt he was thinking of praising God and His wonderful purpose as much as he was wishing to have Joy back with him. As a new Christian I often heard the platitude, "God loves you just the way you are...and He loves you too much to let you stay that way." I wonder what Lewis' response to that statement would have been. On one level, God has created each of us with different gifts and abilities and personalities; but on a greater level, He wants to change the version of us that has been ruined by the world into a more whole version of who He meant for us to be. I find it interesting that even in the material in Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms (and I consider the Psalms to be one of the most honest books of the Bible as far as feeling the freedom to question God's presence), Lewis seems to avoid talking very much about the psalms that question the sovereignty of God. He instead seems to focus on the psalms that speak to the goodness of God rather than those which question Him. I think it is safe to say that Lewis may have asked with the Psalmist, "God, where are You in my pain? Have You forgotten about me?" when he lost Joy to cancer. In fact, in Lewis' poem "Five Sonnets", it becomes very clear that Lewis did not take Joy's passing with the social grace of an Englishman:

We ask what isn't there

And by our asking water and make live

That very part of love which must despair

And die and go down cold into the earth

Before there's talk of springtime and rebirth (Poems 126).

Lewis, it seems, grew tired of asking for his lover back; to do so meant to relive the pain, again, and that was becoming far too painful for Lewis to repeat every day. When Lewis says that "we shall see that there never was any problem (Grief 83)," it sounds like he is in denial about his pain. He comes to the conclusion that if God is good, the trials we go through in life are necessary, "for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't (Grief 50)." When Lewis wrote the eighth stanza of "Epitaphs and Epigrams," he gave some insight into the pain involved in the grieving process and God's role in it, as well as God's potential to heal and His seemingly often-made decision not to intervene. He writes, "All things (e.g. a camel's journey through / A needle's eye) are possible, it's true. / But picture how the camel feels, squeezed out / In one long bloody thread from tail to snout (Poems 134." In other words, most often we will survive trials, but how much of ourselves do we have left? Maybe that's the point -- to get the barriers to God's changes out of the way so He can work His character into us. Maybe we need to become a "long bloody thread" and be reduced to the humiliation of nothing before we can be fully open to God (this idea does not appeal to me, and I'm not sure if I believe it or not).

This brings us to consider the issue of suffering in a different light. Before Lewis lost Joy to cancer, he said that pain was "God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world (Problem 93)." In his expressed pain in A Grief Observed, the reader can almost hear Lewis saying, "I've had enough; I am finished learning what God has to teach me." He says of his experience of grief, "At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again (Grief 62). Lewis further describes his grief in his poem, "The Naked Seed," when he says, "My heart is empty. All the fountains that should run / With longing, are in me / Dried up. In all my countryside there is not one that drips to find the sea (Poems 117)." However, the apostle Paul tells us to "count it all joy...when [we] suffer, because suffering produces perseverance (Romans 5:3)." Perhaps we need to begin thinking about suffering in a different way:

...the sufferings of a completely good and innocent person, Christ, have 'saved' or 'redeemed' sinful humanity. If we can see the sufferings of other good and innocent persons as somehow part of this redemptive process, then we have an answer in principle to the problem of the suffering of the good and innocent. Once we look at Christianity in this light, we can see that it is full of pointers toward this solution. The idea of the church as the Body of Christ, the canonization of the martyrs, the exhortations in the Gospel and Epistles to rejoice when we are found worthy to suffer, all point in this direction (Purtill 35).

We also seem to forget in our own suffering that God has suffered for us in the Person, Jesus, "a high priest who is able to sympathize with our weaknesses (Heb. 4:15)." Somehow, being aware that we are not alien to God in our suffering, that He in fact knows exactly what we are going through because He has gone through it Himself on a much greater scale, makes life's trials less lonely. Is it possible that our ideas of love are nothing more than a hugely watered-down version of the love of God? Maybe our idea of love, in particular of a loving God, is all wrong. If we define God's love for us with our limited human terms, then our definition will be incomplete at best. Lewis says in The Problem of Pain,

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that Godloves 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 (46).

Love must mean more than we think it does; otherwise God could not be characterized by the apostle John as love itself. Lewis says in his poem "Love's as Warm as Tears":

Love's as hard as nails,

Love is nails:

Blunt, thick, hammered through

The medial nerves of One

Who, having made us, knew

The thing He had done,

Seeing (with all that is)

Our cross, and His (Poems 124).

For some reason we think love means wholeness; maybe it means a true awareness of brokenness and humility before God and other people? Eberhard Jungel said, "God defines Himself when He identified Himself with the dead Jesus (source unknown)." Any God who is willing to be seen as broken, dead, powerless, and ridiculous must certainly be a God of greater feeling and emotional proportion and love for us than we could ever have imagined. It isn't that God lets bad things happen to us because He is cruel the way we understand cruelty. In Stephen King's most recent novel, Desperation, the main character, a young boy named David, comes to the awareness that God is cruel, but that His cruelty is refining. God's cruelty is not done for evil -- that would be malice-- but it is done, as difficult as this is for me to write and believe, that what we perceive as God's cruelty is actually for our own good, for our betterment. At the end of the book, David is reminded of 1 John 4:8, which says, "Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." Again, I agree with Lewis that God's love must be totally different than we normally define it. Could it be true that suffering is a privilege? I am beginning to believe so; but often, in the midst of our suffering, we are so focused on the fact that we are hurting that we are unable to see the character which is built by suffering. Lewis says, "After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give (Problem 54)." By not recognizing that our own good can come out of trials, we diminish the possibilities of reaping those benefits. Still, it is difficult in the midst of trials to see the benefits that will follow. In The Problem of Pain, Lewis somewhat chidingly says many times, and in many ways, "God is always good." However, in A Grief Observed, during one of his rawest moments of pain, Lewis says,

Almost His [Jesus'] last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded (emphasis mine, Grief 34)."

Does Lewis consistently believe that God is good? I think the answer is "no." Lewis writes in his aptly-titled poem, "Caught," about feeling trapped and defeated by God's plans for him: "But you have seized in all your rage / of Oneness. Round about, / Beating my wings, all ways, within your cage, / I flutter, but not out (Poems 116)." Struggle as he might, he cannot get free from the grief he feels, as well as the knowledge that an omnipotent God must have allowed this tragedy to befall him.

So who is God, according to Lewis? At first glance it may appear that Lewis' image of God as presented in The Problem of Pain and in A Grief Observed are completely different. However, he is able to reconcile the two otherwise-dichotomous qualities of a completely loving God and a God who would allow, and even encourage, suffering. Lewis says, "I need Christ, not something that resembles Him (Problem 76)." His faith was one that was strong enough to trust that even the most difficult of suffering, which Lewis encountered in the loss of his beloved wife Joy, came from the hand of a loving and merciful God. Maybe he was given the spiritual gift of great faith. In A Grief Observed, Lewis says, "We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least (89)." C. S. Lewis was a Christian who, it seems, was truly able to say along with the apostle Paul in Romans 8:28, "We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him."

King, Stephen. Desperation. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

Lewis, C. S. A Grief Observed. New York: Bantam, 1961.

Lewis, C. S. Poems. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964.

Lewis, C. S. The Problem of Pain. New York: Macmillan, 1940.

Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,

1958.

Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955.

Purtill, Richard L. C. S. Lewis's Case for the Christian Faith. San Francisco,

Harper and Row, 1981.