Transcript Document 7184287

LaGrave Avenue
Christian Reformed Church
The Real C.S. Lewis
Part 4
His Life and Writings: Pain, Suffering, Joy (Shadowlands)
“You’ll never get to the bottom of him.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
Complied by
Paulo F. Ribeiro
MBA, PhD, PE, IEEE Fellow
March 28, 2004, AD
Grand Rapids
1
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but
the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the
stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on
swallowing.
At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There
is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard
to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in.
It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread
the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to
one another and not to me.”
2
“Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting
symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no
sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His
claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and
turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be-or so it feels
welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is
desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A
door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double
bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn
away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will
become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty
house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that
seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He
so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very
absent a help in time of trouble?”
3
The problem of evil is the most irrational problem at all
times, the primary intellectual objection to the Faith,. The
problem is perennial, but the need is greater today
because of the decay of the conviction that faith and
reason are allies and that objections to the faith can be
met and refuted; and this is more and more becoming a
popular excuse for irrationalism, subjectivism and
relativism in the churches.
Lewis addressed the problem of evil with:
Reason (The Problem of Pain)
Psychology (Screwtape and The Great Divorce)
Myth (in the character of Orual in Till We Have Faces)
Own Experience (In A Grief Observed).
4
“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You
are yourself the answer. Before your face
questions die away. What other answer would
suffice?”
Till We Have Faces
5
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our
conscience, but shouts in our pains ......”
“The "Heaven" chapter in The Problem of Pain is so
heavenly that I beg you to tell me any other book or
chapter ever written that explains the ultimate meaning
and end of human life, the life of Heaven, and the joy
that is "the serious business of Heaven," with more
theological, moral, and aesthetic depth and
attractiveness, or which combines the sophistication of
a scholar, the passion of a saint, and the joy of a poet
so seamlessly. Tell me what that book is and I will trade
you my whole library for it.”
Peter Kreeft
6
The Problem of Pain
The main argument of The Problem of Pain is preceded by a presentation
of an atheist objection to the existence of God based on the observable
futility of the universe.
"Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, 'Why do you not
believe in God?' my reply would have run something like this: 'Look at the universe we live
in. By far the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably
cold. The bodies which move in this space are so few and so small in comparison with the
space itself that even if every one of them were known to be crowded as full as it could hold
with perfectly happy creatures, it would still be difficult to believe that life and happiness were
more than a by-product to the power that made the universe…. And Earth herself existed
without life for millions of years and may exist for millions more when life has left her. And
what is it like while it lasts? It is so arranged that all the forms of it can live only by preying
upon one another. In the lower forms this process entails only death, but in the higher there
appears a new quality called consciousness which enables it to be attended with pain. The
creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain, and in pain they mostly die. In
the most complex of all the creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call
reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with
acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence. It
also enables men by a hundred ingenious contrivances to inflict a' great deal more pain than
they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures.
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The Problem of Pain
“This power they have exploited to the full. Their history is largely a record of crime, war,
disease, and terror, with just sufficient happiness interposed to give them, while it lasts, an
agonized apprehension of losing it, and, when it is lost, the poignant misery of
remembering. Every now and then they improve their condition a little and what we call a
civilization appears. But all civilizations pass away and, even while they remain, inflict
peculiar sufferings of their own probably sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may
have brought to the normal pains of man. That our own civilization has done so, no one will
dispute; that it will pass away like all its predecessors is surely probable. Even if it should
not, what then? The race is doomed. Every race that comes into being in any part of the
universe is doomed; for the universe, they tell us, is running down, and will sometime be a
uniform infinity of homogeneous matter at a low temperature. All stories will come to
nothing: all life will turn out in the end to have been a transitory and senseless contortion
upon the idiotic face of infinite matter. If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a
benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite
direction. Either there is no spirit behind the universe, or else a spirit indifferent to good and
evil, or else an evil spirit.'
If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to
attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? […] The spectacle of the universe as
revealed by experience can never have been ground for religion: it must always have been
something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held".
But, where should we look for the sources?
8
The Problem of Pain
The "experience of the Numinous", a special kind of fear which
excites awe, exemplified by, but not limited to, fear of the dead, yet
going beyond mere dread or danger, is the first source; the other is
the moral experience; and both "cannot be the result of inference from
the visible universe" for nothing in the visible universe suggests them.
Likewise, the identification of the Numinous with the Moral, "when the
Numinous Power to which [men] feel awe is made the guardian of the
morality to which they feel obligation" — a choice made by the Jews
— must be viewed as utterly "unnatural" and very much unlike mere
wish fulfillment, for "we desire nothing less than to see that Law
whose naked authority is already insupportable armed with the
incalculable claims of the Numinous". In Christianity, a historical
component is added: an extraordinary man walking about in
Palestine, claiming to be "one with" the Numinous and the Moral.
"Either He was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or
else He was, and is, precisely what He said".
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The Problem of Pain
What is the meaning of God's Omnipotence? Can he do whatever he
pleases? You may attribute miracles to him but not nonsense: "Nonsense
remains nonsense even if we talk it about God."
Lewis discovers that "not even Omnipotence could create a society of free
souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and
'inexorable' Nature"; that a fixed nature of matter implies a possibility,
though not a necessity, of evil and suffering, for "not all states of matter will
be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul"; that souls, if they are
free, may take advantage of the fixed laws of nature to hurt one another;
that a "corrective" intervention by God in the laws of nature, which would
remove the possibility — or the effect — of such abuse, while clearly
imaginable, would eventually lead to a wholly meaningless universe, in
which nothing important depended on man's choices. "Try to exclude the
possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of freewills involve, and you will find that you have excluded life itself". Thus, the
universe as we know it might as well be a product of a wise and omnipotent
Creator; it remains to be shown "how, perceiving a suffering world, and
being assured, on quite different grounds, that God is good, we are to
conceive that goodness and that suffering without a contradiction".
10
The Problem of Pain
The goodness of God means that we are true objects of his love, not of
his disinterested concern for our welfare.
"You asked for a loving God: you have one. […] The consuming fire
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". We may wish for less love; but then we would dream an
impossible dream. God is our only good. He gives "what he has, not
what he has not; the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is
not. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows —
the only food that any possible universe ever can grow — then we must
starve eternally."
11
The Problem of Pain
Because God loves us he will not rest until he sees us wholly lovable. From
that perspective, the suffering of a creature in need of alteration is a mere
corollary to God's goodness. Yet, the problem is that the perception of
man's sinful condition.
Lewis insists, "Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis — in itself a
very bad news — before it can win the hearing for the cure." He considers
two modern developments that contributed to the rise of a belief in the
original innocence: the reduction of all virtues to kindness ("nothing except
kindness is really good"), and the effect of psychoanalysis on the public
mind ("shame is dangerous and must be done away with").
"Kindness is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite
inadequate grounds", for we can feel comfortably benevolent towards fellow
men, as long as their good does not conflict with ours.
"We are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects,
a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves." And at
once we perceive a contradiction.
12
The Problem of Pain
How could a bad creature have come from the hands of a good
Creator? Man, and the rest of creation, was initially good, but through
the abuse of freedom, man made himself an abominable, wicked
creature he now is. This doctrine, which finds no support in science —
only in the Scripture, in the human heart and in newspapers — is
particularly foreign to the modern mind.
Lewis insists that "science has nothing to say for or against the doctrine
of the Fall". Focusing his analysis on the meaning of the terms 'savage'
and 'brute', he shows that the popular notion of a 'savage' needs
correction: "The prehistoric men who made the worst pottery might have
made the best poetry and we should never know it". Also, he shows,
there is no reason why mere "brutality" (in the sense of "animality") of
our remote ancestors should imply their moral wickedness. Thus, it is
conceivable that the paradisal man possessed goodness along with his
natural 'savagery' and 'brutality'. He just may have been created good.
He may have walked in God's will. And he may have chosen to walk out
of it.
13
The Problem of Pain
"We are not merely imperfect creatures that need improvement: we are
rebels that need lay down their arms".
God is in charge; he supervises the circulation of good and evil; and He
does it in a way that satisfies his Goodness, that is, with total respect for
man's freedom.
"In the fallen and partially redeemed universe we may distinguish (1) the
simple good descending from God, (2) the simple evil produced by
rebellious creatures, and (3) the exploitation of that evil by God for His
redemptive purpose, which produces (4) the complex good to which
accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. […] A merciful man aims at
his neighbor's good as so does 'God's' will, consciously co-operating with
'the simple good'. A cruel man oppresses his neighbor and so does simple
evil. But in doing such evil he is used by God, without his knowledge or
consent, to produce the complex good — so that the first man serves God
as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God's
purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you
serve like Judas or like John".
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The Problem of Pain
The proper good of a creature is to surrender to its Creator. However, the
human spirit, hardened through "millennia of usurpation", will not "even
begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it."
Thus, the function of pain, on the lowest level, is to shatter the illusion that
"all is well", to plant "the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul". "We
may rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities", but "pain insists on
being attended to.“
On a higher level, pain shatters yet another illusion: that we are selfsufficient; that all we have is our own doing. This is perhaps where pain,
when it afflicts "honest and decent people", seems most cruel and
undeserved. But Lewis calls it a sign of "divine humility": it is "a poor thing
to come to [God] as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer
worth keeping. […] If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we
came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?"
On the highest level, pain teaches true self-sufficiency: "Human will
becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is
one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it."
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The Problem of Pain
Thus, the ordinary function of pain within the tribulation system is to make a
creature's submission to the will of God easier. Lest it should seem a
justification of pain, Lewis clarifies:
"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. To prove it palatable is beyond my design."
A Christian reflection on pain must end with a vision of heaven:
“The suffering of the present time offers nothing that a mercenary soul
could desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for
only the pure in heart want to".
"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love".
Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you alone, because you
were made for it.”
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The Problem of Pain
When the book was published in 1940, Lewis offered the reader this overly
humble confession: "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."
"If you are writing a book about pain and then you get some actual pain […] it
does not either, as the cynic would expect, blow the doctrine to bits, nor, as a
Christian would hope, turn into practice, but remains quite unconnected and
irrelevant, just as any other bit of actual life does when you are reading or
writing."
In 1961, Lewis wrote about pain again, this time about his own. In A Grief
Observed he satisfied the alleged curiosity of his readers. But he did not
come across as a coward; nor did his firm grasp of "a theory of suffering"
prove altogether irrelevant. True, his faith in God was challenged; he uttered
blasphemies; worst of all, he went through the very objections to God's
goodness which he had refuted in The Problem of Pain. But then, reason
returned: "Why do I make room in my mind for such filth and nonsense? Do I
hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less?"
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Shawdowlands - Themes
Pain and God's Power
"Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all of the great
religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without
chloroform." (The Problem of Pain)
Pain and God's Goodness
"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a
lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."
(The Problem of Pain)
Grief and Faith
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." (A Grief Observed)
The Shadowlands
"The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in the
picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of
death you cannot see the gold." (The Problem of Pain)
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"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself.
What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my
mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my
sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my
trusty comrade, friend, shipmate fellow-soldier. My
mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend
(and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps
more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none
the less been always together, and created a scandal.”
A Grief Observed
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How Hollywood Reinvented C. S. Lewis in the film "Shadowlands."
by John G. West, Jr.
It is understandable why the film Shadowlands (now available on videotape) won rave reviews from almost
everybody. The acting is splendid, the script is literate, and the production design is first-rate. All things
considered, the film is a wonderful piece of cinema and well worth seeing. For those of us who never had the
rare privilege of meeting C. S. Lewis in person, Shadowlands brings Lewis and his world to life in a new way.
Nevertheless, despite its beauty and its pathos, Shadowlands is not without major failings in the realm of
accuracy. Unfortunately, many people seem to take at face value the film's opening claim that "this is a true
story." The reviewer for Christianity Today, for instance, wrote that although "the filmmakers have taken some
liberties with facts…and simplified some of Lewis's complex musings… the film is generally true to Lewis's
life."
As a matter of fact, it isn't. The names of the principal characters are the same, but much of the plot has been
contrived to fit the point of view of scriptwriter William Nicholson.
I'm not complaining about the numerous small inaccuracies. I expected those. After all, it doesn't really matter
that Joy had two sons instead of one (though it might matter if you were the son who was left out). Nor does it
really matter that the marriage between Joy and Jack went on a lot longer than the film indicates (more than
three years in reality). Such errors are minor and certainly fall within the domain of legitimate dramatic license.
What is more difficult to accept are the two huge errors on which the whole plot seems to hinge.
The first of these errors is the depiction of Lewis's life before he met Joy. The film portrays Lewis as leading a
cloistered existence in which he avoided women, children, and --above all-- commitments to any relationship
or situation that offered him the potential for risk or pain. This depiction of Lewis is a convenient way to set up
him up for the film's subsequent love story. But the portrayal invents a C. S. Lewis who never existed.
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Contrary to the storyline of the film, Lewis had lived a life that was anything but cloistered or free from pain or
commitment. During World War I, the supposedly cloistered Lewis served in the trenches in France, where he was
wounded in action. After the war, the supposedly sexless Lewis apparently became infatuated with Mrs. Moore, a
widow old enough to be his mother. When the affair ended and Lewis became a Christian, Lewis the uncommitted
somehow felt obliged to support Mrs. Moore for the rest of her life, and she lived with Lewis and his brother until
she had to be moved to a rest home (where he visited her every day). Meanwhile, the Lewis who did not associate
with children had three children come and stay with him during World War II (they had been sent out of London
because of the air raids (just like Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
Similarly, the Lewis who supposedly avoided women also developed a close friendship with English poetess Ruth
Pitter; he even told a friend that were he the kind of man to get married, he would marry her! And the Lewis who
walked through life without painful experiences had to deal with his rejection by Oxford's academic community,
which never saw fit to select this brilliant scholar for a professorship (Cambridge finally did in the 1950s).
The second huge error of the film is its suggestion that Lewis's faith in God was undermined by Joy's death. While
the film shows grief-torn Lewis saying (quite tentatively) to his stepson that he still believes in heaven, there is
little indication in the film that Lewis still believes in a loving God. Indeed, in an outburst before his friends, Lewis
is shown railing at the brutality of a God who acts as cosmic vivisectionist. Although this scene is invented
(Lewis's grief was intensely private), the speech against God that William Nicholson puts in Lewis's mouth is
actually inspired from a passage in Lewis's A Grief Observed. The problem is that Nicholson is slipshod in the
thoughts he chooses to lift from Lewis: He appropriates Lewis's struggles from A Grief Observed but doesn't bother
to give any sense of the reaffirmation of faith found in the rest of that book -- or in the many other letters,
interviews, and articles by Lewis during the rest of his life. It seems that Mr. Nicholson wasn't interested in
portraying an orthodox Christian who experienced intense grief and yet maintained both his faith and his intellect.
Here is where the pernicious aspect of Shadowlands becomes evident. Lewis's writings -- including his intimate
confessions in A Grief Observed --were largely efforts to vindicate God's often unfathomable ways to man. Lewis
sought to remove the obstacles that separate us from a living relationship with the One who truly loves us.
Shadowlands does precisely the opposite by setting up Lewis's faith as a straw man and then proceeding to knock it
21
down.
The film repeatedly shows Lewis delivering a simplistic speech about how God uses painful experiences to make us
listen to Him. The facile confidence with which Lewis delivers the speech is gradually contrasted with personal hell he
goes through during Joy's sickness and eventual death. By the end of the film, Lewis has presumably recognized that
his simplistic theological dogmas won't wash. He doesn't find God in suffering; he finds a silent void. Thus is the most
cogent defender of Christian orthodoxy of the twentieth century transformed into a modern champion of anguished
doubt.
I tend to think that most people who view Shadowlands will overlook the underlying contempt the film displays for
Lewis's faith because Lewis is portrayed so sympathetically. And make no mistake: Despite the biographical
inaccuracies mentioned above, Lewis is portrayed sympathetically. This film is not anti-Lewis. But perhaps that is
because the villain in this story is not Lewis, but God.
The great irony of Shadowlands is that it even as it draws people closer to Lewis, it may drive them further away from
the One in whom Lewis found the meaning of life. What a tragedy it would be if those who see the film come away
thinking that Lewis's earlier faith was somehow refuted by reality. Mind you, I am not claiming that this will be the
result of Shadowlands. One can only speculate about the effect of the film on individual viewers, and this sort of
speculation is rather dubious anyway. I can only suggest that given the film's script that some viewers may conclude
that Lewis's defense of Christianity could not stand the scrutiny of real life.
There is another possibility, of course: The film may inspire those who see it to read Lewis's writings for themselves
and discover the reality of the faith to which he pointed. I hope that this second possibility will turn out to be the
reality.
22
So what are we left with? A film about a man who wrote children's books (and little else, apparently) and gave lectures to
old ladies; who married late and lost but was pleased he had done so. It has genuinely moving moments: the death bed
marriage; Jack and Douglas crying in the attic; Jack haranguing the priest. Genuinely moving moments: but do they carry
their power because of my memories of other, better version and of my reading of the works of the man himself? I don't
know.
I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing what is in the final analysis a good movie: Hopkins really is
phenomenal, particularly given some of the lines he has to work with. But I do hope that the BBC take the opportunity to
repeat the original: and that when audiences have put their hankies away they read A Grief Observed, maybe the best
Christian book written this century.
Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.
C.S Lewis, 'Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman'
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Shadowlands
24
A Grief Observed
“Once very near the end I said, 'If you can-if it is allowed-come to me when
I too am on my death bed.' , Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job
to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits.' She knew she was
speaking a kind of mythological language, with even an element of comedy
in it. There was a twinkle as well as a tear in her eye. But there was no
myth and no joke about the will, deeper than any feeling, that flashed
through her.
But I mustn't, because I have come to misunderstand a little less
completely what a pure intelligence might be, lean over too far. There is
also, whatever it means, the resurrection of the body. We cannot
understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.
Didn't people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act
of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense
questions.
How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to
me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not at me.
Poi si torno all' eterna fontana.”
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“The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became
an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know
the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all
means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with
it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. But when it flies to and
fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master
Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in
the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then
indeed the eternal dance 'makes heaven drowsy with the harmony'. All
pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in
the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly
incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw
hearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of
sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy.
It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love
Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for
us, but we for it.”
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He took in more, he felt more, he remember more,
he invented more … His writings record an intense
awareness, a vigorous reaction, a taking of the
world into his heart … His blacks and whites of
good and evil and his ecstasies and miseries were
the tokens of a capacity for experience beyond our
scope.
Austin Farrer on C.S. Lewis
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“There was one candle on the coffin as it was
carried out into the churchyard. It seemed not only
appropriate but also a symbol of the man and his
integrity and absoluteness and his faith that the
flame burned so steadily, even in an open air, and
seemed so bright, even in the bright sun.”
Peter Bayley at Lewis’s funeral
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