The Problem of Pain Literary Elements

Nonfiction, philosophy

The book was written in England in 1940, at the beginning of World War II; the book's message is therefore especially applicable to the time.

As this is a nonfiction, philosophically argumentative work, it is written from the first-person point of view of the author, C.S. Lewis, a Christian writer and academic famous for his apologetics.

Instructive, contemplative, expositional

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One of the major arguments brought against Christianity is the belief that a God who is both all-powerful and all-loving would not allow his creations (humans) to suffer in the way that humans suffer on Earth, so this sort of God must not exist. Lewis takes this argument and defends Christianity from its polemic, attempting to prove that this theodicy question is not a tenable reason to disbelieve in God.

After Lewis spends the majority of the book talking about wickedness, suffering, and hell, he concludes the book by writing the final chapter on Heaven, demonstrating the glorious alternative to eternal suffering and the end toward which all transformative suffering is oriented. He ends the book with a hopeful image of Christians entering Heaven, where the understanding of the entirety of Being is revealed to them.

Lewis's presentation of the "problem of pain" in the introduction to the book foreshadows the ways he will eventually disprove, reconstruct, and refute that argument, at least insofar as he deems necessary to render it a less-than-mortal objection.

"Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear." (3)

Many allusions are made throughout the book to external sources such as other books, places, figures, events, and so forth. One particular example is Lewis's citation of The Wind in the Willows, quoting a particular scene that supports his point in the introduction, as well as his immediately following reference to the Prelude of William Wordsworth.

This book is primarily concerned with addressing the so-called "problem of pain," and Lewis doesn't shy away from using affecting imagery to emphasize the severity and reality of suffering in this world: "When I think of pain — of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that spreads out like a desert, and the heart-breaking routine of monotonous misery, or again of dull aches that blacken our whole landscape or sudden nauseating pains that knock a man’s heart out at one blow, of pains that seem already intolerable and then are suddenly increased, of infuriating scorpion-stinging pains that startle into maniacal movement a man who seemed half dead with his previous tortures — it 'quite o’ercrows my spirit'" (65). By using such imagery throughout the book, Lewis demonstrates that he isn't simply another theoretical philosopher justifying pain as an abstract concept, but one who genuinely knows the impact these arguments have on real, everyday life.

The very "problem of pain" is the assertion of a paradox: if Christianity is true, then the supposedly all-powerful and all-loving God is neither all-powerful nor all-loving, or at the most one of the two. This creates a paradox, which Lewis attempts to disprove in the course of the book.

Lewis's address of Hell in Chapter VIII parallels his address of Heaven in Chapter X, both of which he describes in detail and with significant amounts of appropriate imagery.

"Going back about a century we find copious examples in Wordsworth..." (4)

In this case, "Wordsworth" is metonymous with "Wordsworth's poetry."

"Israel is a false wife, but Her heavenly Husband cannot forget the happier days" (24).