Little by little I have been weaving the reading of "The problem of Pain" by C.S. Lewis through all my other reading. As I look back I have realized that the past 5 books I have read have been attempts to give a thorough theodicy. In chapter 3 of Lewis' "The problem of Pain" he really makes some astounding points, points that find their corruption in the question of pain in our world that is governed by a loving God. The question he is attempting to reconcile is "how does pain exist in a world created by a God who is also good?" Though Lewis is simply commentating on this topic, and never affirms that he considers himself anything more than a layman, he certainly picks the brain. I will admit that his view of love is one very comparable to my own (one I had prior to reading this book) ... maybe that is why I loved this chapter so much? Call me biased. Many christians flock to Lewis for penning "The chronicles of Narnia" but I think that when people get over the magic of Narnia and walk into this mans mind we see so much more.
In Lewis' own words:
Christ calls men to repent- a call which would be meaningless if God's standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practice. He appeals to our existing moral judgement-'Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?' (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own conceptions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures-'What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?' (Jeremiah 2:5) After the preliminaries it will, I hope, be safe to suggest that some conceptions of the Divine goodness with tend to dominate our thought, though seldom expressed in so many words, are open to criticism.
By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness-- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, no so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven-- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'. Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets, that Love is something more stern and splendid that mere kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, ' a lord of terrible aspect'. There is kindness in love, but love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object- we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. (Hebrews 12:8) It is for people we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
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. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment'. Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life-- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother of a child-- he will take endless trouble-- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommended for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, 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.
Later on Lewis parallels the love of God and man between that of a man and a dog to show the differences in perception of love in the 2 ...
Great merit lies in the fact that the association of man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes the dog that he may love it, not that is may love him, and that is may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interest are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Not just because the dog is by human standards one of the 'best' of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love- of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations- man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, it it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the 'goodness' of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout the good man) takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only it is an animal high in the scale- because it is so nearly lovably that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses- that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves; but once again, we are asking not for more love, but less love.
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 objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. God's love, far from being caused by goodness IN the object, causes all goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence, if God sometimes speaks as though the Impassible could suffer passion, and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, can this mean only, if it means anything intelligible BY us, that God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created IN Himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of His own choosing."
-C.S. Lewis
In Lewis' own words:
Christ calls men to repent- a call which would be meaningless if God's standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practice. He appeals to our existing moral judgement-'Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?' (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own conceptions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures-'What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?' (Jeremiah 2:5) After the preliminaries it will, I hope, be safe to suggest that some conceptions of the Divine goodness with tend to dominate our thought, though seldom expressed in so many words, are open to criticism.
By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness-- the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, no so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven-- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all'. Not many people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets, that Love is something more stern and splendid that mere kindness: that even the love between the sexes is, as in Dante, ' a lord of terrible aspect'. There is kindness in love, but love and kindness are not coterminous, and when kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object- we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons who are to carry on the family tradition, are punished. (Hebrews 12:8) It is for people we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
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. Here again we come up against what I have called the 'intolerable compliment'. Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life-- the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother of a child-- he will take endless trouble-- and would, doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and recommended for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumbnail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, 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.
Later on Lewis parallels the love of God and man between that of a man and a dog to show the differences in perception of love in the 2 ...
Great merit lies in the fact that the association of man and dog is primarily for the man's sake: he takes the dog that he may love it, not that is may love him, and that is may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog's interest are not sacrificed to the man's. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different fashion, serves it. Not just because the dog is by human standards one of the 'best' of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love- of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations- man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man's love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole proceeding would seem, it it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on the 'goodness' of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger, healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts. It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout the good man) takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog, only it is an animal high in the scale- because it is so nearly lovably that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed, that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow our natural impulses- that he would give over trying to train us into something so unlike our natural selves; but once again, we are asking not for more love, but less love.
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 objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. God's love, far from being caused by goodness IN the object, causes all goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability. God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive. Hence, if God sometimes speaks as though the Impassible could suffer passion, and eternal fullness could be in want, and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare existence upwards, can this mean only, if it means anything intelligible BY us, that God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and created IN Himself that which we can satisfy. If he requires us, the requirement is of His own choosing."
-C.S. Lewis
Ouch, so true, I too am guilty of the desire of God whose main concern for me is that I am having a fun time! Thanks, Seth.
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