You would like to know how I behave when I am experiencing pain, not writing books about it. “All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the author. 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.” (90–1) “We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we ignore even pleasure. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words.” (53) We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues-like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so off and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. The very act of confession-an infinitesimally hypocritical glance-a dash of humour-all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. We may confess ugly facts-the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity-but the tone is false. On God using pain to make us like Jesus: “…it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.” (35) 1 Forgive me for the length of some of them-in those cases I thought the full passage necessary to rightly present Lewis’ argument, or else the language was so beautiful that I couldn’t resist. Instead of a full book review, here’s a collection of my favourite quotes from The Problem of Pain. He thinks carefully, writes superbly, and exalts Christ rightly. Lewis has a way of presenting the truths of our faith in a way that pierces me anew with the sheer beauty of them. Lewis was far smarter than I could ever hope to be.

And if I’m honest, there was plenty I didn’t understand, because C.S.

There was plenty in this book that I didn’t agree with. I grabbed it off my shelf when I needed a relatively small book to read on the train, and ended up finishing it in three days.

When the issue of suffering is discussed, somebody inevitably recommends The Problem of Pain by C.S. The first Christian book I’ve finished in 2020 is one that I’ve been meaning to read for years.

Cs lewis the problem of pain review