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PREFACE

When Mr Ashley Sa of this book, I asked leave to be allowed to write it anonyht about pain, I should be forced to make statements of such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone kneho made them Anonymity was rejected as inconsistent with the series; but Mr Sa that I did not live up to ra out Let ood Walter Hilton, that throughout this book 'I feelof that I speak, that I can naught else but cry mercy and desire after it as I may'1 Yet for that very reason there is one criticisainst me No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound', for I have never for one ination of serious pain was less than intolerable If anythis adversary, I am that man I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual proble fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to supposeto offer my readers except e helps e, a little hue, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all

If any real theologian reads these pages he will very easily see that they are the work of a layman and an amateur Except in the last two chapters, parts of which are ad ancient and orthodox doctrines If any parts of the book are 'original', in the sense of being novel or unorthodox, they are so against norance I write, of course, as a layland: but I have tried to assu that is not professed by all baptised and co Christians

As this is not a work of erudition I have taken little pains to trace ideas or quotations to their sources when they were not easily recoverable Any theologian will see easily enough what, and how little, I have read

C S LEWIS

Magdalen College, Oxford, 1940

INTRODUCTORY

I wonder at the hardihood hich such persons undertake to talk about God In a treatise addressed to infidels they begin with a chapter proving the existence of God frorounds for thinking that the proofs of our religion are very weak It is a remarkable fact that no canonical writer has ever used Nature to prove God

PASCAL, Pensees, IV, 242, 243

Not o when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, 'Why do you not believe in God?'like this: 'Look at the universe we live in By far the greatest part of it consists of einably 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 As it is, however, the scientists think it likely that very few of the suns of space - perhaps none of them except our own - have any planets; and in our own system it is improbable that any planet except the Earth sustains life 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 for upon one another In the lower forher 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 , and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring perenious contrivances to inflict a great deal more pain than they otherwise could have done on one another and on the irrational creatures 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 the it, and, when it is lost, the poignantEvery now and then they improve their condition a little and e call a civilisation appears But all civilisations pass away and, even while they res of their own probably sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they ht to the normal pains of man That our own civilisation 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 doo in any part of the universe is doo down, and will soeneous : 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'

There was one question which I never dreath and facility of the pessimists' case at once poses us a problem If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did hus ever coood Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, froers belief The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it ion, acquired from a different source, was held

It would be an error to reply that our ancestors were ignorant and therefore entertained pleasing illusions about nature which the progress of science has since dispelled For centuries, during which all htmare size and emptiness of the universe was already known You will read in soht the Earth flat and the stars near, but that is a lie Ptolemy had told them that the Earth was a mathematical point without size in relation to the distance of the fixed stars - a distance which one medieval popular text estimates as a hundred and seventeen innings, ot the same sense of hostile immensity fro forest h, and the utterly alien and infest which we have to fetch fro and howling nightly to his very doors Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of hu the Jews, a people squeezed between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive, faic story of the conquered It isthe discoveries of science Lay down this book and reflect for five ions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without chloroform

At all times, then, an inference frooodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally preposterous; and it was never in In what follows itthe truth of Christianity but describing it's origin - a task, in my view, necessary if we are to put the proble

In all developed religion we find three strands or elements, and in Christianity one more The first of these is what Professor Otto calls the experience of the Numinous Those who have notdevice Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next rooer and would probably feel fear But if you were told 'There is a ghost in the next room', and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is prihost host It is 'uncanny' rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread With the Uncanny one has reached the fringes of the Nuhty spirit in the roos would then be even less like the er: but the disturbance would be profound You would feel wonder and a certain shrinking - a sense of inadequacy to cope with such a visitant and of prostration before it - an eht be expressed in Shakespeare's words 'Under itmay be described as awe, and the object which excites it as the Numinous