Notes/Quotes From C.S Lewis: The Problem of Pain

(Our) 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 unifrom infinity of homogenous 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.
-CSL

All men stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. the second element in religion is the consciousness not merely of a moral law, but of a moral law at once approved and disobeyed. This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find it there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
-CSL

There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be 'one with', the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking-- a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly-- that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way.
-CSL

If any message from the core of reality ever were to reach us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that wilful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch-- the rough, male taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face.
-CSL

Love can forbear, and Love can forgive... but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object... He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored.
- Traherne

The Divine 'goodness' differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child's first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.
-CSL

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much as a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven-- a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'A good time was had by all.'... I should very much like to live in a universe which was goverened on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don't, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction.
-CSL

Kindness, merely as such, cares ot whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering... If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
-CSL

We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something which He will not be satisfied with until it has a certain character... In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed us for a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then are wishing not for more love but for less.
-CSL

Israel is the pauper bride, the waif whom her Lover found abandoned by the wayside, 'Adulteresses' St James calls us, because we turn aside to the 'friendship of the world', while God 'jealously longs for the spirit He has implanted in us'. The Church is the Lord's bride whom He so loves that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable. For the truth which this analogy serves to emphasise is that love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved; that the mere 'kindness' which tolerates anything except suffering in its object is, in that respect, at the opposite pole from Love.

-CSL

When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested', because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one.

-CSL

We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'. To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.

-CSL

God has no needs. Human love, as Plato teaches us, is the child of Poverty-- of a want or lack; it is caused by a real or supposed good in its beloved which the lover needs and desires. But God's love, far from being caused by goodness in the object, causes all goodness which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, lovability.

-CSL

God is goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it. In that sense all His love is, as it were, bottomlessly selfless by very definition; it has everything to give and nothing to receive.

-CSL

If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

-CSL

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunitic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. But God will sour good, and our good is to love Him (with that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces.

-CSL

We are biddden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

-CSL

God gives us what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God-- to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response-- to be miserable-- these are the only three alternatives. If we will n ot learn to eat the only food that the universe grows-- the only food that any possible universe can ever grow-- than we must starve eternally.

-CSL

The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place'... though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We think we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste or humble.

-CSL

Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are adressed.

-CSL

A God who did not regard (our sin) with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God-- it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abolished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never delight any creature, because our own breath happens to stink.

-CSL

If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance or inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

-William Law

Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his 'faith in human nature' who is really sad.

-CSL

From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.... It is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.

-CSL

They wanted, as we say, to 'call their souls their own'. But that means to live a lie, for our souls are not, in fact, our own. They wanted some corner in the universe of which they could say to God, 'This is our business, not yours.' But there is no such corner. They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives.

-CSL

In the world as we now know it, the problem is how to recover the self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

-CSL

...I call (God using pain as a 'megaphone to a deaf world') a Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up 'our own' when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is 'nothing better' now to be had.

-CSL

Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. The mould in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansiuons. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you-- you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith.

-CSL

The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'.

-CSL

From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever.

-CSL