PoE (Reprise)

In my look at historical responses to the problem of evil, pain, and suffering (see my last post for Part 1), I want to discuss just two more Christian thinkers.

The first is C.S. Lewis, medievalist scholar, author, and apologist. His book The Problem of Pain is recognized as a classic on this subject, and in it he provides what many consider to be excellent arguments in defense of the God of Judeo-Christianity in light of the existence of evil and suffering in the world.

More recently, Roman Catholic philosopher Eleanor Stump has provided what I find to be one of the most insightful analyses of this issue of suffering. She categorizes most of such arguments—those from The Problem of Pain and of Augustine, Pascal, and Plantinga—as coming from the “third-person” perspective. These are philosophical arguments about the evil “out there.” An entirely different facet of the problem of evil is the “first-person” perspective. This encompasses the sufferings, doubts, and questions (as about God’s existence and goodness) that are experienced by the person currently living in grief, pain, or fear. And the person going through such an experience has little use for the arguments given from a third-person perspective.

Indeed, later in life, Lewis experienced firsthand the depths of grief associated with the untimely death of his wife (after only four years of marriage). His doubts (about the very existence and goodness of God, about his own Christian worldview) are chronicled in A Grief Observed. A reading of this makes it clear that the arguments he gave in his earlier book (which were third-person arguments) would have been ill-received if offered to him during his first-person experience of grief.

To return to the book of Job… his so-called friends offer Job third-person arguments for what he is going through, and provide him no comfort. (This is exacerbated by the fact that their arguments fall along the lines of the Deuteronomic view… “You must have done something grievously wrong for Yahweh to be punishing you like this.”) At the end of the book, God Himself visits and speaks with Job. And part of what God offers is third-person arguments. In essence, He tells Job that His ways and purposes are ultimately beyond Job’s finite understanding. But, according to Stump, we are wrong if we think that this is sufficient to account for the change in Job’s attitude.

Rather, says Stump, what made the difference is that Job had had a “second-person” encounter with God. He could no longer doubt God’s existence (as might be our situation from either a first- or third-person perspective), because he had now spoken with Him face to face.

By analogy, consider the 6-year-old boy with an otherwise fatal condition that is about to face corrective surgery. He has been in pain, and what he has heard (from the doctors, nurses, and others) has given him reason to fear even greater pain. Obviously, he does not need his mother to inundate him with medical terms and a thorough explanation about the procedure and its expected consequences. All he needs is to see her loving and concerned face, to feel the squeeze of her hand, to know (without understanding) that the pain through which he is about to go is what his loving mother considers best for him.

That, says Eleanor Stump, is what the book of Job offers us. Job’s attitude changes because he encounters God again, remembers the great love He has shown for Job, and trusts (without full understanding) that God can redeem whatever earthly suffering Job is called to face.

Lewis on War

I have a little book of essays (transcripts, actually, of oral addresses) by C.S. Lewis. One is titled "Why I am Not a Pacifist," and is a talk he gave to a pacifist society in Oxford sometime in 1940.

In this essay, Lewis makes a very compelling case for his conclusion that he cannot endorse pacifism, either through rational argument or appeal to the Bible. Without quoting the whole essay here, I cannot hope to do it justice, so that's not my purpose. I encourage you to read it yourself.*

To Lewis, the evidence against pacifism is--once he has undertaken the exercise of looking into it--so overwhelming that he wonders why he even questioned it in the first place. He suspects, in retrospect, that there was a strong ulterior motive for wishing his researches might have led to an opposite conclusion. And in discussing this aspect of the issue, he details the misery of the soldier's life in a very insightful passage. This, I guess, is what I particularly wanted to share, as many of us currently have friends, family, or neighbors going through the adversity of a soldier's life that Lewis so well identifies. Remember, Lewis was speaking to a group of pacifists in the early years of WWII.

It remains to inquire whether, if I still remain a Pacifist, I ought to suspect the secret influence of any passion. I hope you will not misunderstand me. I do not intend to join in any of the jibes to which those of your persuasion are exposed in the popular press. Let me say at the outset that I think it unlikely there is anyone present less courageous than myself. But let me also say that there is no man alive so virtuous that he need feel himself insulted at being asked to consider the possibility of a warping passion when the choice is one between so much happiness and so much misery. For let us make no mistake. All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it seperates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil--every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. On the other side, though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing. Some public opprobrium, yes, from people whose opinion you discount and whose society you do not frequent, soon recompensed by the warm mutual approval which exists, inevitably, in any minority group. For the rest it offers you a continuance of the life you know and love, among the people and in the surroundings you know and love. It offers you time to lay the foundations of a career; for whether you will or no, you can hardly help getting the jobs for which the discharged soldiers will one day look in vain. You do not even have to fear, as Pacifists may have had to fear in the last war, that public opinion will punish you when the peace comes. For we have learned now that though the world is slow to forgive, it is quick to forget.

*I have this seldom-published piece in a little book called The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses.

The Law of Nature

C.S. Lewis, the great 2oth century author, philanthropist, professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature (at Cambridge), and Christian apologist, believed--as have most Western thinkers up to our day--that morality is absolute, objective, and universal. The following quote from Mere Christianity, in which he refers to that universal morality as the "Law of Nature," is just a part of his common sense argument against moral relativism--the rather modern view that morality is subjective (whether personal or cultural)...

I hope you will not misunderstand what I am going to say. I am not preaching, and Heaven knows I do not pretend to be better than anyone else. I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There may be all sorts of excuses for us. That time you were so unfair to the children was when you were very tired. That slightly shady business about the money--the one you have almost forgotten--came when you were very hard-up. And what you promised to do for old So-and-so and have never done--well, you never would have promised if you had known how frightfully busy you were going to be. And as for your behaviour to your wife (or husband) or sister (or brother), if I knew how irritating they could be, I would not wonder at it--and who the dickens am I, anyway? I am just the same. That is to say, I do not succeed in keeping the Law of Nature very well, and the moment anyone tells me I am not keeping it, there starts up in my mind a string of excuses as long as your arm. The question at the moment is not whether there are good excuses. The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much--we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so--that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves.