C.S. Lewis: "Why Love is not incompatible with suffering"
From my friend and fellow C.S. fan Curt at North Western Winds:
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
The awareness of a distinction between Love and Kindness and the recognition of what it means to be the object of God's love make it easier to comprehend why Love is not incompatible with suffering. 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, and hence of a real need for alteration — a thing obvious even to ancient pagans — has largely disappeared from the modern horizon, rendering the Christian call to repentance and conversion unintelligible. To talk to the modern man, 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, he says, 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. He then considers in some detail the symptoms of man's wretchedness and brings us, step by step, to an inescapable conclusion: "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.
Nothing except kindness is good? How often I've tried to cut through the modern (read "socialistic") arguments that it would be a good thing to eliminate human suffering.... "I mean, no one should have to suffer, right?" Of course we have to suffer, as it merely means that we do not always get our way. What a crazy world it would be if instead of real standards, everyone walked in their own way....
"They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall." D&C 1: 16
The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
The awareness of a distinction between Love and Kindness and the recognition of what it means to be the object of God's love make it easier to comprehend why Love is not incompatible with suffering. 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, and hence of a real need for alteration — a thing obvious even to ancient pagans — has largely disappeared from the modern horizon, rendering the Christian call to repentance and conversion unintelligible. To talk to the modern man, 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, he says, 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. He then considers in some detail the symptoms of man's wretchedness and brings us, step by step, to an inescapable conclusion: "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.
Nothing except kindness is good? How often I've tried to cut through the modern (read "socialistic") arguments that it would be a good thing to eliminate human suffering.... "I mean, no one should have to suffer, right?" Of course we have to suffer, as it merely means that we do not always get our way. What a crazy world it would be if instead of real standards, everyone walked in their own way....
"They seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness, but every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol, which waxeth old and shall perish in Babylon, even Babylon the great, which shall fall." D&C 1: 16
posted by Peggy Snow Cahill at 11:51 AM
<< Home