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Lecture Narrator
Foreign.
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Jeremiah Regan
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan. And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with CS Lewis on Christianity, and we're going on to suffering and death today. One of the things that's amazing about Lewis is his ability to depict joyful celebrations and triumphs and feasts and all these lovely things. But he doesn't shy away from the dark and the scary and the things that grieve you. And it's necessary, in his view, to be able to comprehend and contemplate the dark and unsavory things as well. They increase the joy of the celebration and they make it more real. And in this lecture, we're going to go into that very deeply. Lewis looked at the problem of pain. And essentially, if you have a good God that created the world, why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? And so Lewis will take a look at this in two different books from two different ways. Meaning in the Problem of Pain, he looks at it from a philosophical point of view. You know, does it make sense? Is it logical for a good, for a good God to create a world where there is pain? And then he looks at it from an emotional point of view. And that book is called A Grief Observed. And one of the best ways that I've seen this portrayed Lewis's views is in the movie Shadowlands. It's a 19th century 1993 movie with Anthony Hopkins. And the movie covers the period of time when Lewis met his wife. And he was married for a very short period of time, three years or so. That's right, because she dies of cancer. And of course, the movie starts again with Lewis having this very philosophical view of pain. And the famous line he says is that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. But then as the movie goes through and he falls in love with this woman and he starts understanding pain from a very personal point of view, that's when the lessons from a grief observed come out. And so pain moves from the realm of the mind and understanding it simply from a philosophical point of view and moves to the heart. Where is an understanding of pain? Much more from an emotional point of view. And that's something that we all go through because we all not only understand pain from a reasonable point of view, but we all experience pain in life. And we need to understand how to deal with that, how to understand that, especially in a world that we believe was created by a good God. In his typically incisive way. He doesn't denigrate the philosophical or the emotional view, but points to the fact that we need both of these perspectives on dealing with pain and suffering. If you're enjoying this podcast, I invite you to subscribe and follow. It's one of the best ways that you can help us. You can do that if you're listening in itunes or Spotify or from our own side. So please go and subscribe and follow. Now let's turn to CS Lewis on Christianity with the lecture Suffering and Death.
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Lecture Narrator
The 22nd of November 1963 is a date famous in the history of the 20th century. It was on that day, a Friday, that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. And that very same day, in fact, within the very same hour that the President was shot, CS Lewis died in his home at Oxford. It's remarkable that Kennedy's violent death and Lewis's peaceful demise at home should have coincided like this. Later that same day, another notable figure, Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, also left this life. In this talk I want to outline what Lewis thought about suffering and death, focusing in particular on two of his works, two very different kinds of works that address this topic. The problem of pain, which is a very philosophical and intellectual approach, and a grief observed, a personal and deeply emotional expression of pain, private bereavement. We might even say that the problem of pain looks at suffering while a grief observed looks along it. The contemplation, enjoyment, distinction meets us yet again. But first, a few biographical facts showing something of how Lewis came to his views on these topics. His earliest encounter with Los was at the age of nine when his mother Flora died. Writing years later about the experience of being taken to see her body, Lewis wrote, to this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel of beauty compared with the loveliest of the dead. Fast forward a decade and we find Lewis on his 19th birthday, entering the trenches of the Great War, having been commissioned as an officer in the British Army. He remembered the horribly smashed men still moving like half crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, and he noted how 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. Lewis served in the First World War for about six months before being blown up during the spring of 1918 when a British shell that was zooming over the British lines towards the Germans, it fell short and detonated in his trench, apparently annihilating the man next to him, his sergeant and spattering Lewis full of shrapnel, bits of which he carried around in his body for decades afterwards. He was invalided back to England and spent a further six months recovering from his war wounds. He wrote many angry and bitter poems around this time, publishing them in that volume, Spirits in Bondage. And in this volume he gives vent to the hurt and confusion of his wartime experience, a particularly bleak example being the poem Ode for New Year's Day, which includes these Nature will not pity, nor the red God lend an ear. Yet I too have been mad in the hour of bitter paining, and lifted up my voice to God, thinking that he could hear the curse wherewith I cursed him, because the good was dead. He was not yet a Christian when he wrote those lines. But an interesting thing about Lewis is that once he had become a Christian, he continued to think it right and proper to acknowledge and express emotions of grief and dismay and confusion, even anger. And Lewis pointed to the fact that Jesus himself wept at the grave of Lazarus and sweated blood before his crucifixion. We shouldn't be ashamed to admit our own sorrows, our own fears. Lewis was impatient with those Christians who uttered easy platitudes and bromides about death being a small thing. He thought them naive and sentimental. Death is a real thing, and anything real matters. We'll see how Lewis himself was propelled into agonies of heart and soul after the death of his wife in that late work, A Grief observed. But first let's consider the Problem of Pain. This was Lewis's first work of Christian apologetics. It came out in 1940, and in the preface Lewis explains that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience. I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified. So the Problem of Pain is an avowedly intellectual book. The question he's trying to answer how can pain exist in a world created by a supposedly good and all powerful God? Either God doesn't choose to prevent pain, in which case he isn't good, or else he can't prevent it, in which case he isn't all powerful. Lewis's main response, his chief way of addressing this problem, is to argue that pain is a tool in God's hands, for as he writes, pain insists on being attended to. 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. Why do we need to be roused by this megaphone of pain? Because we're under an illusion, an illusion that all is well, that our lives are our own, that we're the masters of our fate and the captains of our soul. But when pain threatens us, we're awoken to the reality of our situation, to our mortality, to the great uncontrollable factor in our lives, namely the day of our death. Only when we're forced to consider that unpleasant reality do we emerge from the sweet dream of self sufficiency that we otherwise very naturally prefer. Remember the historical context in which Lewis wrote this book. It appeared, as I say, in 1940, the first full year of the Second World War. People were having to face death like never before. They wanted answers to questions which they hadn't been required to address so urgently for a long time. Throughout the 1930s, Winston Churchill had been warning that Germany was dangerous and that Britain was woefully under equipped to meet that danger. You can't put off the evil hour forever, he said. At some stage we're going to have to meet this enemy. As Churchill had nagged the governments of the 1930s, so pain, Lewis says, nags us to wake up to the peril that is facing us. And what is this peril? It's the illusion that we're fine as we are and don't need to change. But God loves us so much that he's willing to challenge us and our half hearted understanding of what love might mean in relationship with him. So Lewis can say this. 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 God's love. You asked for a loving God, you have one. 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. Since God does indeed love us like this, and since we are under an illusion that all is well and need to be woken up from that illusion, the process by which that happens is unlikely to be painless. It will be humiliating to be told that we are mortal and that surgery is required to cure us of our misunderstanding. So that is the main thesis of the problem of pain. Pain reminds us of the truth of our situation, that we are less than perfect, that we are going to die, that we will have to face God, and that we will have to learn to love him just as Jesus Christ did. The whole approach that Lewis adopts could be summarized by reference to the epigraph that he uses at the front of the book. It's a line from George MacDonald and it goes like the Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his. Christ's passion and death become a recurrent reference point throughout the book. It's that suffering, Christ's pains, that is meant to strike us as the foundation stone for Lewis's whole argument. So, having established Christ's sufferings as his anchor, his tap root, Lewis then opens the book with a thumbnail sketch of the development of Christianity before proceeding to discuss divine omnipotence and divine goodness and then to discussing human goodness corrupted into sin by freely made choices that can't be self reversed. We've jumped down a mineshaft and we can't get out of it. We need God's help. Only in the sixth chapter of the book, more than halfway through, does he begin to address some of the possible lessons that we may in certain circumstances learn from the experience of suffering. He lists three first, suffering may show bad men where they're wrong, that their prideful, self centered attitude to life doesn't answer. Second, suffering may show all people the good no less than the bad, that their lives are not their own, and that self sufficiency isn't an option. We really must live in relation with God. Third, suffering may show people where they are consciously choosing the good. Because when moral choices are made in the teeth of our natural desires, for instance the desire to avoid pain, we can fully know that we're choosing from disinterested motives. In the remainder of the book, Lewis advances a number of further propositions which he regards as relevant, including the belief that suffering, though it may be turned to positive effect, should nonetheless be avoided and relieved where possible. Consistent with honesty and courage, he introduces the theme of divine justice and God's eradication of evil from the universe by means of that freely chosen self negation called hell. We'll talk more about that in the next lecture. The book ends with a discussion of eternal beatitude and participation in the divine life of heaven, and we'll say more about that in the next lecture too. But let's return to the George MacDonald epigraph. The son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer but that their sufferings might be like his. Lewis understands pain principally in connection with this Jewish rabbi in his early 30s who was stripped naked and nailed to a wooden stake on a trumped up charge under a blazing sun, who in his final agony cries out in utter desolation, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As Lewis puts it, not only all natural supports, but the presence of the very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim. This suffering is so intense that it leaves Jesus completely disorientated, so it seems, without any awareness of purpose or moral context, but only questioning why God has abandoned him. Nevertheless, as Lewis proceeds to say, Christ's surrender to God does not falter, even though God forsakes it. And the reason for saying that Christ's surrender didn't falter is that Christ returned from death. He rose from the grave, he was vindicated on the third day. And this vindication ultimately allows for a complete reinterpretation of his sufferings. It's essential, though, that this reinterpretation of the events of Good Friday Jesus death doesn't get entangled with our initial interpretation of them. If our knowledge of the resurrection is allowed prematurely to interfere with our understanding of the cross, then we haven't really understood the cross. We have not, as it were, heard the lived language of the Christ story, that lived language, which is a language more adequate than any other. We have not experienced the true myth, the true story of Christ in which events happen consecutively and only consecutively. Rather, we've stepped out of the story and treated it as a kind of allegory, translated it into other terms, timeless and abstract, doctrinal categories of sacrifice and propitiation that may be valuable in their own way when we're thinking theologically, but are less true than the terms within which the story was actually experienced by its original participants. It's interesting that of all scriptural verses, the one that appears in Lewis's works more often than any other, and by quite a large margin, is the cry of dereliction from the cross. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Jesus is quoting Psalm 22 when he says that. And this is really important. This, I think, is the heart of what Lewis is trying to explain. Although he certainly believed that pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world, his more fundamental belief about pain was that pain is Christ's agony beneath a deaf sky. The very nub of Lewis's faith was in Christ, who experienced Godforsakenness, who did indeed die and yet in remaining faithful to his father, defeated death and rose again, the miracle of the resurrection is that it shows God forsakenness to be redeemable, reinterpretable. However, although Christ's crucifixion is a recurrent reference point throughout the Problem of Pain, and although it's the background against which Lewis expects us to hear all his other arguments, it's not, I think, the most striking and memorable thing about the book. And so it's hardly surprising that the deliberately challenging megaphone metaphor has stuck in readers minds. Instead, if you see the film Shadowlands, the film about Lewis's late marriage starring Anthony Hopkins and Deborah Winger, you find that the screenplay for that movie by William Nicholson focuses in very much on this megaphone image. And that's understandable because the Problem of Pain is not a very well written book in my estimation. Lewis was still learning his craft as an apologist when he wrote this book. You would have expected him, I think, to give us a whole chapter about the passion and death of Christ, given the centrality of it. But he doesn't give us that. He just gives us scattered references here and there throughout the text. And they're probably too scattered to have the effect that Lewis apparently means them to have.
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Scott Bertram
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Lecture Narrator
Also, the very fact that he starts out so boldly by declaring that he's going to try to solve the intellectual problem of pain is somewhat breathtaking, as if the problem of pain were simply soluble rather than a perennially problematic issue that needs to continually be wrestled with. Because, of course, part of the problem of pain is that it's not merely an intellectual problem. It's a physical problem. It's medical, it's psychological, it's social, it's spiritual. And the curious thing is that Lewis seems to realize that what he's trying to write will prove insufficient. He says this all arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment against the authority. 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. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them already. They are the same as yours. I am not arguing that pain is not painful. I am only trying to show that the old Christian doctrine of being made perfect through suffering is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my design. This statement goes some way to protecting Lewis against the bitterness which he rightly says is provoked by arguments in justification of suffering. And it reminds us of what he said earlier in the preface, that he's deliberately limiting himself to an intellectual approach because for the far higher task of teaching fortitude and patience, I was never fool enough to suppose myself qualified. Fortitude and patience come in when reason and argument exhaust themselves. We may have good ideas about how to approach suffering, but how we actually go through suffering in the furnace of real pain, that's another matter. In fact, I don't believe that Lewis regarded fortitude and patience as being teachable, not really. At least not directly, as he says, you'd like to know how I behave when I'm experiencing pain, not writing books about it. If a writer is to teach anything about fortitude and pain, the only way he can do so, I would suggest, is indirectly by showing that he can experience it or that he has experienced it, nonetheless holds to a belief in a loving God. That's the way of demonstrating the validity of these arguments, because pain is much more than a problem to be addressed by means of knowledge, by ratiocination, by just thinking about it. Intellectual answers, even when they seem plausible, are of little practical value the presence of actual suffering. So if a writer is to teach anything about fortitude and patience and the love of God, which are the resources more needful when coping with real pain, the best way to do so is by imitating the language more adequate than any other the language provided by the Christ story and to retell that story in various ways. In the second lecture of this series, we looked at some of Lewis's fictional depictions of the Christ story. Now let's turn to the place where he depicts a lived, non fictional response to the Christ story in his own experience of suffering, in his own response to the death of his wife. 1960 in his book A Grief Observed, C.S. lewis married late in life. He married an American woman called Joy Gresham in 1957, and they had three years of happy marriage together before she died of cancer in 1960 at the age of only 45. Immediately after her death, Lewis wrote down an account of his feelings and published it under the pseudonym N D W Clark. And an ironic result of its anonymous publication is that certain readers who had heard of Lewis's bereavement sent him a Grief observed by NW Clark, saying, read this, it will help you with your grief. The book takes the form of jottings in the diary, a sort of journal account day by day, and it's a simple account of the various stages through which Lewis passes as he attempts to assimilate his wife's death into his own continuing life. No other work of Lewis's is so dark or thinks so many unthinkable thoughts. In a way, it's small wonder that he wished to publish it anonymously. The first mention of God in the book notes God's absence. Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate and what do you find? A door slammed in your face a little later. And this absence of God is considered with reference to the cry of dereliction. Except this time, unlike in the Problem of Pain, Christ's cry from the cross is itself put under interrogation. Twice Clark. I think there's some merit in referring to the author of this book as Clarke rather than Lewis. Twice Clark drags his mind to Christ's sense of forsakenness, and twice he refuses to find any comfort in it. Here are the relevant why hast thou forsaken me? I know. Does that make it any easier to understand? Almost. Christ's 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 questioning here, even of the cry of dereliction, is a sign of the depths of misery that Lewis is sounding. You may perhaps think that a Christian shouldn't think such thoughts, but Lewis would argue that he is only doing what Job does in the Old Testament book of Job, setting forth his complaints before God, showing God what was actually in his heart rather than what ought to be in his heart. Lewis points out elsewhere that it's Job, the one who accepts our ordinary standard of good and by it hotly criticizes divine justice, who receives the divine approval at the end of the book. Whereas the orthodox pious people, the Job's comforters in the story, who palter with that standard in an attempt to justify God and say to Job, oh, it's all your fault. Get over it. They are condemned at the end of the book. But these dark and challenging moments in a grief observed occur in the first and second parts. It's in the third part, when Lewis is beginning to finally turn his mind to God as a primary consideration, that the change comes. He says this. Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early, for various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious. My heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. The interesting thing about this heart lightening is what it follows what has been described in the immediately preceding paragraphs, where Lewis has been questioning whether it's ever allowed for one sufferer to bear the burdens of another sufferer. And the answer he got when he asked that question is this. It was allowed to one Jesus, we are told, and I find that I can now believe again that he has done vicariously. Whatever can be so done. Jesus replies to our babble, you cannot and you dare not. I could and dared. It's after that moment that Lewis finds he can now believe again. But how does this come about? What's going on? This is the mysterious thing about a grief observed. No explicit explanation is given, and as so often in Lewis, this is deliberate. It was one of his foundational principles as an author that what the reader is made to do for himself has a particular importance in literature. Don't spoon feed the reader, don't make it all plain, but set the pieces in such a configuration that the reader can deduce the desired answer himself. So it seems that Lewis has come to a realization that his love for his wife, deep though it was, was not after all sufficient to cope with the situation that he was presented with as she was dying. In asking himself whether he could have borne her burdens, he says, but one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then for the first time we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But there's no opportunity for him actually to take upon himself her. Her cancer. He can't do that. So it's a false prospect. It's not a real option. But he nonetheless tries to imagine himself into the hypothetical situation. And as he does so, he apparently realizes that, well, he probably doesn't mean it so very seriously. After all, even if he would have borne her sufferings, even if he had tried to, he couldn't have done so. He doesn't have the power. He's only a mortal human being, like she is. He's only a man, a needy and imperfect man, as she was a needy and imperfect woman. And this realization is humiliating to him. Not only has she died, now he is reminded of his own mortality and his own finitude. In other words, all supports finally fall away. He realizes he's got nothing. He plunges down at last into genuine dereliction. And that is to say that he can now share in Christ's cross and therefore in Christ's rising. It's the same pattern that Lewis had traced in his conversion in 1931 and repeatedly thereafter throughout his Christian life. As he writes in his book, miracles go down to go up. It is a key principle through this bottleneck, this belittlement, the high road nearly always lies. Lewis told a friend that the structure of a grief observed was meant to reflect the structure of the Divine Comedy, the great poetic masterpiece of the Middle Ages by the Italian poet Dante. In Dante's case, at the end of his passage through the Inferno through hell, the pilgrim climbs down from Lucifer's shoulders to Lucifer's waist and then assumes that he would descend even further down his legs. But in fact he finds that once he has passed the midpoint, he actually begins going upwards, that the route from his waist to his feet is actually an ascent. The pilgrim passes the center of gravitation, Lewis says. What was down miraculously turns out to be up. Lucifer, by the way, is standing through the very center of the earth. This is the first true science fiction effect in the history of literature, in Lewis's view, and he saw its usefulness as an analogy to for the emotional transformation that can follow in the path of imitating Christ's crucifixion. True consolation comes from imitating the one who did not refuse the cup of suffering, but rather said, not my will, but thine be done, setting his face like flint and during the cross, despising its shame. And by following Christ's example and accepting pain in all its terrible forsaking of our earthly hopes, Lewis believes that he can share spiritually in Christ's crucifixion and therefore also eventually in Christ's resurrection. Go down. Go up. The last words of the book are a look up, as it were. Lewis writes that as his wife died, she smiled, but not at me. Poisitorno al eterna Fontana. Then she turned to the eternal fountain. The quotation is from Dante's Divine Comedy, and Lewis gives it in Italian without translation. Very annoying if you don't know Italian. I remember the first time I read the book thinking, how has he ended that? With a line I can't understand, but his wife turns to the eternal fountain of life as she dies. The quotation is meant to communicate the fact that as joy is turning away from him to God, she is turning to the source of living water, springing up to eternal life. And it's that hope, the hope for heaven, a hope grounded on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which provides, in Lewis's view, the best approach, the most meaningful approach, the ultimately most realistic approach to the problem of pain. I reckon, said St Paul, that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us. And if this IS so, as C.S. lewis believed it to be so a Christian approach to suffering, which says nothing of heaven, is leaving out almost one whole side of the account. Scripture and the Christian tradition habitually put the joys represented by heaven and the justice represented by hell into the scale of against the suffering and injustice experienced on earth. And no solution of the problem of pain which fails to address heaven and hell can really be called a Christian approach. So in the next and the final lecture in this course, we will turn to what Lewis has to say about both heaven and hell.
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Jeremiah Regan
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