TEXT: C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN

by

                             

C. S. LEWIS

First Published October 1940

TO THE INKLINGS

The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer,
but that their sufferings might be like His.

    George Macdonald.
                                       _Unspoken Sermons. First Series._




 PREFACE


When Mr. Ashley Sampson suggested to me the writing of this book, I asked
leave to be allowed to write it anonymously, since, if I were to say what
I really thought about pain, I should be forced to make statements of
such apparent fortitude that they would become ridiculous if anyone knew
who made them. Anonymity was rejected as inconsistent with the series;
but Mr. Sampson pointed out that I could write a preface explaining that
I did not live up to my own principles! This exhilarating programme I am
now carrying out. Let me confess at once, in the words of good Walter
Hilton, that throughout this book “I feel myself so far from true feeling
of 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 criticism which
cannot be brought against me. No one can say “He jests at scars who never
felt a wound”, for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to
which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If
any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am
that man. I must add, too, that the only purpose of the book is to solve
the intellectual problem raised by suffering; for the far higher task of
teaching fortitude and patience I was never fool enough to suppose myself
qualified, nor have I anything to offer my readers except my conviction
that when pain is to be borne, a little courage helps more than much
knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, 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 admittedly speculative, I have believed
myself to be re-stating ancient and orthodox doctrines. If any parts of
the book are “original”, in the sense of being novel or unorthodox, they
are so against my will and as a result of my ignorance. I write, of
course, as a layman of the Church of England: but I have tried to assume
nothing that is not professed by all baptised and communicating
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.




CONTENTS



 I. INTRODUCTORY                                                
II. DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE                                          
III. DIVINE GOODNESS                                             
IV. HUMAN WICKEDNESS                                            
V. THE FALL OF MAN                                            
VI. HUMAN PAIN                                                 
VII. HUMAN PAIN, continued_                                  
VIII. HELL                                                       
IX. ANIMAL PAIN                                                
 X. HEAVEN                                                     
APPENDIX                                                   




 I. INTRODUCTORY


I wonder at the hardihood with which such persons undertake to talk about
God. In a treatise addressed to infidels they begin with a chapter
proving the existence of God from the works of Nature . . . this only
gives their readers grounds 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. _Pensées_, IV, 242, 243.

Not many years ago when I was an atheist, if anyone had asked me, “Why do
you not believe in God?” my reply would have run something like this:
“Look at the universe we live in. By far the greatest part of it consists
of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably 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 bye-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 forms of it can live only by preying upon one another. In the lower
forms this process entails only death, but in the higher 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 mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while
keenly desiring permanence. It also enables men by a hundred ingenious
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 them, while it lasts, an agonised apprehension of losing it, and,
when it is lost, the poignant misery of remembering. Every now and then
they improve their condition a little and what we call a civilisation
appears. But all civilisations pass away and, even while they remain,
inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably sufficient to outweigh
what alleviations they may have brought 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 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 uniform infinity of homogeneous
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. 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 dreamed of raising. I never noticed
that the very strength 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 human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a
wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as
that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to
virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers
belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never
have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in
spite of which religion, 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 men
believed, the nightmare size and emptiness of the universe was already
known. You will read in some books that the men of the Middle Ages
thought 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 mediæval
popular text estimates as a hundred and seventeen million miles. And in
times yet earlier, even from the beginnings, men must have got the same
sense of hostile immensity from a more obvious source. To prehistoric man
the neighbouring forest must have been infinite enough, and the utterly
alien and infest which we have to fetch from the thought of cosmic rays
and cooling suns, came snuffing and howling nightly to his very doors.
Certainly at all periods the pain and waste of human life was equally
obvious. Our own religion begins among the Jews, a people squeezed
between great warlike empires, continually defeated and led captive,
familiar as Poland or Armenia with the tragic story of the conquered. It
is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down
this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great
religions were first preached, and long practised, in a world without
chloroform.

At all times, then, an inference from the course of events in this world
to the goodness and wisdom of the Creator would have been equally
preposterous; and it was never made.[2] Religion has a different origin.
In what follows it must be understood that I am not _primarily_ arguing
the truth of Christianity but describing its origin—a task, in my view,
necessary if we are to put the problem of pain in its right setting.

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 not met this term may be
introduced to it by the following device. 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. 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 primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but
of the mere fact that it is a ghost. 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 Numinous. Now suppose
that you were told simply “There is a mighty spirit in the room”, and
believed it. Your feelings would then be even less like the mere fear of
danger: 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 emotion which might be expressed in
Shakespeare’s words “Under it my genius is rebuked”. This feeling may be
described as awe, and the object which excites it as the _Numinous_.

Now nothing is more certain than that man, from a very early period,
began to believe that the universe was haunted by spirits. Professor Otto
perhaps assumes too easily that from the very first such spirits were
regarded with numinous awe. This is impossible to prove for the very good
reason that utterances expressing awe of the Numinous and utterances
expressing mere fear of danger may use identical language—as we can still
say that we are “afraid” of a ghost or “afraid” of a rise in prices. It
is therefore theoretically possible that there was a time when men
regarded these spirits simply as dangerous and felt towards them just as
they felt towards tigers. What is certain is that now, at any rate, the
numinous experience exists and that if we start from ourselves we can
trace it a long way back.

A modern example may be found (if we are not too proud to seek it there)
in _The Wind in the Willows_ where Rat and Mole approach Pan on the
island.

“‘Rat,’ he found breath to whisper, shaking, ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Afraid?’
murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. ‘Afraid? of
Him? O, never, never. And yet—and yet—O Mole, I am afraid.’”

Going back about a century we find copious examples in Wordsworth—perhaps
the finest being that passage in the first book of the _Prelude_ where he
describes his experience while rowing on the lake in the stolen boat.
Going back further we get a very pure and strong example in Malory,[3]
when Galahad “began to tremble right hard when the deadly (= mortal)
flesh began to behold the spiritual things”. At the beginning of our era
it finds expression in the Apocalypse where the writer fell at the feet
of the risen Christ “as one dead”. In Pagan literature we find Ovid’s
picture of the dark grove on the Aventine of which you would say at a
glance _numen inest_[4]—the place is haunted, or there is a Presence
here; and Virgil gives us the palace of Latinus “awful (_horrendum_) with
woods and sanctity (_religione_) of elder days”.[5] A Greek fragment
attributed, but improbably, to Æschylus, tells us of earth, sea, and
mountain shaking beneath the “dread eye of their Master”.[6] And far
further back Ezekiel tells us of the “rings” in his Theophany that “they
were so high that they were dreadful”[7]: and Jacob, rising from sleep,
says “How dreadful is this place!”[8]

We do not know how far back in human history this feeling goes. The
earliest men almost certainly believed in things which would excite the
feeling in us if _we_ believed in them, and it seems therefore probable
that numinous awe is as old as humanity itself. But our main concern is
not with its dates. The important thing is that somehow or other it has
come into existence, and is widespread, and does not disappear from the
mind with the growth of knowledge and civilisation.

Now this awe is not the result of an inference from the visible universe.
There is no possibility of arguing from mere danger to the uncanny, still
less to the fully Numinous. You may say that it seems to you very natural
that early man, being surrounded by real dangers, and therefore
frightened, should invent the uncanny and the Numinous. In a sense it is,
but let us understand what we mean. You feel it to be natural because,
sharing human nature with your remote ancestors, you can imagine yourself
reacting to perilous solitudes in the same way; and this reaction is
indeed “natural” in the sense of being in accord with human nature. But
it is not in the least “natural” in the sense that the idea of the
uncanny or the Numinous is already contained in the idea of the
dangerous, or that any perception of danger or any dislike of the wounds
and death which it may entail could give the slightest conception of
ghostly dread or numinous awe to an intelligence which did not already
understand them. When man passes from physical fear to dread and awe, he
makes a sheer jump, and apprehends something which could never be
_given_, as danger is, by the physical facts and logical deductions from
them. Most attempts to explain the Numinous presuppose the thing to be
explained—as when anthropologists derive it from fear of the dead,
without explaining why dead men (assuredly the least dangerous kind of
men) should have attracted this peculiar feeling. Against all such
attempts we must insist that dread and awe are in a different dimension
from fear. They are in the nature of an interpretation man gives to the
universe, or an impression he gets from it; and just as no enumeration of
the physical qualities of a beautiful object could ever include its
beauty, or give the faintest hint of what we mean by beauty to a creature
without æsthetic experience, so no factual description of any human
environment could include the uncanny and the Numinous or even hint at
them. There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe.
Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing
objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to
disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher,
or saint: or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural,
to which the name Revelation might properly be given.

The Numinous is not the same as the morally good, and a man overwhelmed
with awe is likely, if left to himself, to think the numinous object
“beyond good and evil.” This brings us to the second strand or element in
religion. All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some
kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the
experiences expressed by the words “I ought” or “I ought not”. These
experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be
logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the
man who undergoes them. You can shuffle “I want” and “I am forced” and “I
shall be well advised” and “I dare not” as long as you please without
getting out of them the slightest hint of “ought” and “ought not”. And,
once again, attempts to resolve the moral experience into something else
always presuppose the very thing they are trying to explain—as when a
famous psycho-analyst deduces it from prehistoric parricide. If the
parricide produced a sense of guilt, that was because men felt that they
ought not to have committed it: if they did not so feel, it could produce
no sense of guilt. Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man
goes beyond anything that can be “given” in the facts of experience. And
it has one characteristic too remarkable to be ignored. The moralities
accepted among men may differ—though not, at bottom, so widely as is
often claimed—but they all agree in prescribing a behaviour which their
adherents fail to practise. All men alike 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.

The moral experience and the numinous experience are so far from being
the same that they may exist for quite long periods without establishing
a mutual contact. In many forms of Paganism the worship of the gods and
the ethical discussions of the philosophers have very little to do with
each other. The third stage in religious development arises when men
identify them—when the Numinous Power to which they feel awe is made the
guardian of the morality to which they feel obligation. Once again, this
may seem to you very “natural”. What can be more natural than for a
savage haunted at once by awe and by guilt to think that the power which
awes him is also the authority which condemns his guilt? And it is,
indeed, natural to humanity. But it is not in the least obvious. The
actual behaviour of that universe which the Numinous haunts bears no
resemblance to the behaviour which morality demands of us. The one seems
wasteful, ruthless, and unjust; the other enjoins upon us the opposite
qualities. Nor can the identification of the two be explained as a
wish-fulfilment, for it fulfils no one’s wishes. We desire nothing less
than to see that Law whose naked authority is already unsupportable armed
with the incalculable claims of the Numinous. Of all the jumps that
humanity takes in its religious history this is certainty the most
surprising. It is not unnatural that many sections of the human race
refused it; non-moral religion, and non-religious morality, existed and
still exist. Perhaps only a single people, as a people, took the new step
with perfect decision—I mean the Jews: but great individuals in all times
and places have taken it also, and only those who take it are safe from
the obscenities and barbarities of unmoralised worship or the cold, sad
self-righteousness of sheer moralism. Judged by its fruits, this step is
a step towards increased health. And though logic does not compel us to
take it, it is very hard to resist—even on Paganism and Pantheism
morality is always breaking in, and even Stoicism finds itself
willy-nilly bowing the knee to God. Once more, it may be madness—a
madness congenital to man and oddly fortunate in its results—or it may be
revelation. And if revelation, then it is most really and truly in
Abraham that all peoples shall be blessed, for it was the Jews who fully
and unambiguously identified the awful Presence haunting black
mountain-tops and thunderclouds with “the _righteous_ Lord” who “loveth
righteousness”.[9]

The fourth strand or element is a historical event. 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. If the records make the first hypothesis
unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else
that is claimed by Christians becomes credible—that this Man, having been
killed, was yet alive, and that His death, in some manner
incomprehensible to human thought, has effected a real change in our
relations to the “awful” and “righteous” Lord, and a change in our
favour.

To ask whether the universe as we see it looks more like the work of a
wise and good Creator or the work of chance, indifference, or
malevolence, is to omit from the outset all the relevant factors in the
religious problem. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical
debate on the origins of the universe: it is a catastrophic historical
event following on the long spiritual preparation of humanity which I
have described. It is not a system into which we have to fit the awkward
fact of pain: it is itself one of the awkward facts which have to be
fitted into any system we make. In a sense, it creates, rather than
solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by
side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received
what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and
loving.

Why this assurance seems to me good, I have more or less indicated. It
does not amount to logical compulsion. At every stage of religious
development man may rebel, if not without violence to his own nature, yet
without absurdity. He can close his spiritual eyes against the Numinous,
if he is prepared to part company with half the great poets and prophets
of his race, with his own childhood, with the richness and depth of
uninhibited experience. He can regard the moral law as an illusion, and
so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity. He can refuse to
identify the Numinous with the righteous, and remain a barbarian,
worshipping sexuality, or the dead, or the life-force, or the future. But
the cost is heavy. And when we come to the last step of all, the
historical Incarnation, the assurance is strongest of all. The story is
strangely like many myths which have haunted religion from the first, and
yet it is not like them. It is not transparent to the reason: we could
not have invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious _a priori_
lucidity of Pantheism or of Newtonian physics. It has the seemingly
arbitrary and idiosyncratic character which modern science is slowly
teaching us to put up with in this wilful universe, where energy is made
up in little parcels of a quantity no one could predict, where speed is
not unlimited, where irreversible entropy gives time a real direction and
the cosmos, no longer static or cyclic, moves like a drama from a real
beginning to a real end. 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.

If, on such grounds, or on better ones, we follow the course on which
humanity has been led, and become Christians, we then have the “problem”
of pain.




 II. DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE


Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.
                      Thomas Aquinas. _Summ. Theol._, I^a Q XXV, Art. 4.

“If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy,
and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the
creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power,
or both.” This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The
possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms “good” and
“almighty”, and perhaps also the term “happy” are equivocal: for it must
be admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to
these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the
argument is unanswerable. In this chapter I shall make some comments on
the idea of Omnipotence, and, in the following, some on the idea of
Goodness.

_Omnipotence_ means “power to do all, or everything”.[10] And we are told
in Scripture that “with God all things are possible”. It is common
enough, in argument with an unbeliever, to be told that God, if He
existed and were good, would do this or that; and then, if we point out
that the proposed action is impossible, to be met with the retort, “But I
thought God was supposed to be able to do anything”. This raises the
whole question of impossibility.

In ordinary usage the word _impossible_ generally implies a suppressed
clause beginning with the word _unless_. Thus it is impossible for me to
see the street from where I sit writing at this moment; that is, it is
impossible to see the street _unless_ I go up to the top floor where I
shall be high enough to overlook the intervening building. If I had
broken my leg I should say “But it is impossible to go up to the top
floor”—meaning, however, that it is impossible _unless_ some friends turn
up who will carry me. Now let us advance to a different plane of
impossibility, by saying “It is, at any rate, impossible to see the
street _so long as_ I remain where I am and the intervening building
remains where it is”. Someone might add “unless the nature of space, or
of vision, were different from what it is”. I do not know what the best
philosophers and scientists would say to this, but I should have to reply
“I don’t know whether space and vision _could possibly_ have been of such
a nature as you suggest”. Now it is clear that the words _could possibly_
here refer to some absolute kind of possibility or impossibility which is
different from the relative possibilities and impossibilities we have
been considering. I cannot say whether seeing round corners is, in this
new sense, possible or not, because I do not know whether it is
self-contradictory or not. But I know very well that if it is
self-contradictory it is absolutely impossible. The absolutely impossible
may also be called the intrinsically impossible because it carries its
impossibility within itself, instead of borrowing it from other
impossibilities which in their turn depend upon others. It has no
_unless_ clause attached to it. It is impossible under all conditions and
in all worlds and for all agents.

“All agents” here includes God Himself. His Omnipotence means power to do
all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically
impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is
no limit to His power. If you choose to say “God can give a creature
free-will and at the same time withhold free-will from it,” you have not
succeeded in saying _anything_ about God: meaningless combinations of
words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them
the two other words “God can”. It remains true that all _things_ are
possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but
nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His
creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not
because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains
nonsense even when we talk it about God.

It should, however, be remembered that human reasoners often make
mistakes, either by arguing from false data or by inadvertence in the
argument itself. We may thus come to think things possible which are
really impossible, and _vice versâ_.[11] We ought, therefore, to use
great caution in defining those intrinsic impossibilities which even
Omnipotence cannot perform. What follows is to be regarded less as an
assertion of what they are than a sample of what they might be like.

The inexorable “laws of Nature” which operate in defiance of human
suffering or desert, which are not turned aside by prayer, seem, at first
sight to furnish a strong argument against the goodness and power of God.
I am going to submit that not even Omnipotence could create a society of
free souls without at the same time creating a relatively independent and
“inexorable” Nature.

There is no reason to suppose that self-consciousness, the recognition of
a creature by itself as a “self”, can exist except in contrast with an
“other”, a something which is not the self. It is against an environment,
and preferably a social environment, an environment of other selves, that
the awareness of Myself stands out. This would raise a difficulty about
the consciousness of God if we were mere theists: being Christians, we
learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous
to “society” exists within the Divine being from all eternity—that God is
Love, not merely in the sense of being the Platonic form of love, but
because, within Him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all
worlds and are thence derived to the creatures.

Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice
implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no
environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like
self-consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing) again
demands the presence to the self of something other than the self.

The minimum condition of self-consciousness and freedom, then, would be
that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct
from God. It is possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and
themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so, their freedom is simply
that of making a single naked choice—of loving God more than the self or
the self more than God. But a life so reduced to essentials is not
imaginable to us. As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge
of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity of “Nature”.

People often talk as if nothing were easier than for two naked minds to
“meet” or become aware of each other. But I see no possibility of their
doing so except in a common medium which forms their “external world” or
environment. Even our vague attempt to imagine such a meeting between
disembodied spirits usually slips in surreptitiously the idea of, at
least, a common space and common time, to give the _co-_ in
_co-existence_ a meaning: and space and time are already an environment.
But more than this is required. If your thoughts and passions were
directly present to me, like my own, without any mark of externality or
otherness, how should I distinguish them from mine? And what thoughts or
passions could we begin to have without objects to think and feel about?
Nay, could I even begin to have the conception of “external” and “other”
unless I had experience of an “external world”? You may reply, as a
Christian, that God (and Satan) do, in fact, affect my consciousness in
this direct way without signs of “externality”. Yes: and the result is
that most people remain ignorant of the existence of both. We may
therefore suppose that if human souls affected one another directly and
immaterially, it would be a rare triumph of faith and insight for any one
of them to believe in the existence of the others. It would be harder for
me to know my neighbour under such conditions than it now is for me to
know God: for in recognising the impact of God upon me I am now helped by
things that reach me through the external world, such as the tradition of
the Church, Holy Scripture, and the conversation of religious friends.
What we need for human society is exactly what we have—a neutral
something, neither you nor I, which we can both manipulate so as to make
signs to each other. I can talk to you because we can both set up
sound-waves in the common air between us. Matter, which keeps souls
apart, also brings them together. It enables each of us to have an
“outside” as well as an “inside”, so that what are acts of will and
thought for you are noises and glances for me; you are enabled not only
to _be_, but to _appear_: and hence I have the pleasure of making your
acquaintance.

Society, then, implies a common field or “world” in which its members
meet. If there is an angelic society, as Christians have usually
believed, then the angels also must have such a world or field; something
which is to them as “matter” (in the modern, not the scholastic, sense)
is to us.

But if matter is to serve as a neutral field it must have a fixed nature
of its own. If a “world” or material system had only a single inhabitant
it might conform at every moment to his wishes—“trees for his sake would
crowd into a shade”. But if you were introduced into a world which thus
varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would
thus lose the exercise of your free will. Nor is it clear that you could
make your presence known to me—all the matter by which you attempted to
make signs to me being already in my control and therefore not capable of
being manipulated by you.

Again, if matter has a fixed nature and obeys constant laws, not all
states of matter will be equally agreeable to the wishes of a given soul,
nor all equally beneficial for that particular aggregate of matter which
he calls his body. If fire comforts that body at a certain distance, it
will destroy it when the distance is reduced. Hence, even in a perfect
world, the necessity for those danger signals which the pain-fibres in
our nerves are apparently designed to transmit. Does this mean an
inevitable element of evil (in the form of pain) in any possible world? I
think not: for while it may be true that the least sin is an incalculable
evil, the evil of pain depends on degree, and pains below a certain
intensity are not feared or resented at all. No one minds the process
“warm—beautifully hot—too hot—it stings” which warns him to withdraw his
hand from exposure to the fire: and, if I may trust my own feeling, a
slight aching in the legs as we climb into bed after a good day’s walking
is, in fact, pleasurable.

Yet again, if the fixed nature of matter prevents it from being always,
and in all its dispositions, equally agreeable even to a single soul,
much less is it possible for the matter of the universe at any moment to
be distributed so that it is equally convenient and pleasurable to each
member of a society. If a man travelling in one direction is having a
journey down hill, a man going in the opposite direction must be going up
hill. If even a pebble lies where I want it to lie, it cannot, except by
a coincidence, be where you want it to lie. And this is very far from
being an evil: on the contrary, it furnishes occasion for all those acts
of courtesy, respect, and unselfishness by which love and good humour and
modesty express themselves. But it certainly leaves the way open to a
great evil, that of competition and hostility. And if souls are free,
they cannot be prevented from dealing with the problem by competition
instead of by courtesy. And once they have advanced to actual hostility,
they can then exploit the fixed nature of matter to hurt one another. The
permanent nature of wood which enables us to use it as a beam also
enables us to use it for hitting our neighbour on the head. The permanent
nature of matter in general means that when human beings fight, the
victory ordinarily goes to those who have superior weapons, skill, and
numbers, even if their cause is unjust.

We can, perhaps, conceive of a world in which God corrected the results
of this abuse of free-will by His creatures at every moment: so that a
wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon, and the
air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves
that carry lies or insults. But such a world would be one in which wrong
actions were impossible, and in which, therefore, freedom of the will
would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to its logical
conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral matter
which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to frame
them. All matter in the neighbourhood of a wicked man would be liable to
undergo unpredictable alterations. That God can and does, on occasions,
modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part
of the Christian faith; but the very conception of a common, and
therefore, stable, world, demands that these occasions should be
extremely rare. In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary
concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the
game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of
a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made
inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened
to suit him—if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces
disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his
liking—then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of
souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity,
the whole natural order, are at once the limits within which their common
life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is
possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of
nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you
have excluded life itself.

As I said before, this account of the intrinsic necessities of a world is
meant merely as a specimen of what they might be. What they really are,
only Omniscience has the data and the wisdom to see: but they are not
likely to be _less_ complicated than I have suggested. Needless to say,
“complicated” here refers solely to the human understanding of them; we
are not to think of God arguing, as we do, from an end (co-existence of
free spirits) to the conditions involved in it, but rather of a single,
utterly self-consistent act of creation which to us appears, at first
sight, as the creation of many independent things, and then, as the
creation of things mutually necessary. Even we can rise a little beyond
the conception of mutual necessities as I have outlined it—can reduce
matter as that which separates souls and matter as that which brings them
together under the single concept of Plurality, whereof “separation” and
“togetherness” are only two aspects. With every advance in our thought
the unity of the creative act, and the impossibility of tinkering with
the creation as though this or that element of it could have been
removed, will become more apparent. Perhaps this is not the “best of all
possible” universes, but the only possible one. Possible worlds can mean
only “worlds that God could have made, but didn’t”. The idea of that
which God “could have” done involves a too anthropomorphic conception of
God’s freedom. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean
indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect
goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect
wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The
freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself
produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own
goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the
air in which they all flower.

And that brings us to our next subject—the Divine goodness. Nothing so
far has been said of this, and no answer attempted to the objection that
if the universe must, from the outset, admit the possibility of
suffering, then absolute goodness would have left the universe uncreated.
And I must warn the reader that I shall not attempt to prove that to
create was better than not to create: I am aware of no human scales in
which such a portentous question can be weighed. Some comparison between
one state of being and another can be made, but the attempt to compare
being and not being ends in mere words. “It would be better for me not to
exist”—in what sense “for me”? How should I, if I did not exist, profit
by not existing? Our design is a less formidable one: it is only to
discover how, perceiving a suffering world, and being assured, on quite
different grounds, that God is good, we are to conceive that goodness and
that suffering without contradiction.




 III. DIVINE GOODNESS


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. _Centuries of Meditation_, II, 30.

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threatens us with the
following dilemma.

On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from
ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us
good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may
not be evil.

On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our
“black” may be His “white”, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for
to say “God is good,” while asserting that His goodness is wholly other
than ours, is really only to say “God is we know not what”. And an
utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or
obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) “good” we shall obey, if at all,
only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent
Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity—when the consequence is drawn
that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply
nothing—may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human
relations, when the man of inferior moral standards enters the society of
those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept
_their_ standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly
accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the
University I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be.
Some faint distaste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my
utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self sacrifice I thought as a
baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set
of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently
close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy,
but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of
good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a
case is not in the least like being asked to treat as “white” what was
hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as
mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but
“as lords that are certainly expected”. You can have no doubt in which
direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds
of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But
the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is
accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having
blundered into society that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such
experiences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt,
His idea of “goodness” differs from ours; but you need have no fear that,
as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral
standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and
your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the
change demanded of you is in the direction you already call “better”. 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.

This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a
call which would be meaningless if God’s standard were sheerly different
from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to
our existing moral judgement—“Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is
right?”[12] God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis
of their own conceptions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts
Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—“What iniquity
have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?”[13]

After these preliminaries it will, I hope, be safe to suggest that some
conceptions of the Divine goodness which tend to dominate our thought,
though seldom expressed in so many words, are open to criticism.

By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His
lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by Love, in this context,
most of us mean kindness—the desire to see others than the self happy;
not happy in this way or in that, but just happy. 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 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”. Not many
people, I admit, would formulate a theology in precisely those terms: but
a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds. I do not
claim to be an exception: I should very much like to live in a universe
which was governed 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.

I might, indeed, have learned, even from the poets, that Love is
something more stem and splendid than mere kindness: that even the love
between the sexes is, as in Dante, “a lord of terrible aspect”. There is
kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous, and when
kindness (in the sense given above) is separated from the other elements
of Love, it involves a certain fundamental indifference to its object,
and even something like contempt of it. Kindness consents very readily to
the removal of its object—we have all met people whose kindness to
animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should
suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes
good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points
out, it is bastards who are spoiled: the legitimate sons, who are to
carry on the family tradition, are punished.[14] It is for people whom we
care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our
friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see
them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. 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.

The relation between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and
cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another.
God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being. He
is further from us because the sheer difference between that which has
Its principle of being in Itself and that to which being is communicated,
is one compared with which the difference between an archangel and a worm
is quite insignificant. He makes, we are made: He is original, we
derivative. But at the same time, and for the same reason, the intimacy
between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that
creatures can attain with one another. Our life is, at every moment,
supplied by Him: our tiny, miraculous power of free will only operates on
bodies which His continual energy keeps in existence—our very power to
think is His power communicated to us. Such a unique relation can be
apprehended only by analogies: from the various types of love known among
creatures we reach an inadequate, but useful, conception of God’s love
for man.

The lowest type, and one which is “love” at all only by an extension of
the word, is that which an artist feels for an artefact. God’s relation
to man is pictured thus in Jeremiah’s vision of the potter and the
clay,[15] or when St. Peter speaks of the whole Church as a building on
which God is at work, and of the individual members as stones.[16] The
limitation of such an analogy is, of course, that in the symbol the
patient is not sentient, and that certain questions of justice and mercy
which arise when the “stones” are really “living” therefore remain
unrepresented. But it is an important analogy so far as it goes. We are,
not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something
that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be
satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against
what I have called the “intolerable compliment”. Over a sketch made idly
to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content
to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over
the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a
different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a
child—he will take endless trouble—and would, doubtless, thereby _give_
endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a
sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the
tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making
was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that
God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but
then we are wishing not for more love but for less.

Another type is the love of a man for a beast—a relation constantly used
in Scripture to symbolise the relation between God and men; “we are his
people and the sheep of his pasture”. This is in some ways a better
analogy than the preceding, because the inferior party is sentient, and
yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not
made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in
the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the
man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it
may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at
the same time, the dog’s interests are not sacrificed to the man’s. The
one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in
its fashion, loves him, nor can it serve him unless he, in a different
fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of
the “best” of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to
love—of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such
an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations—man
interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere
nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which
frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to
steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. To the puppy the whole
proceeding would seem, if it were a theologian, to cast grave doubts on
the “goodness” of man: but the full-grown and full-trained dog, larger,
healthier, and longer-lived than the wild dog, and admitted, as it were
by Grace, to a whole world of affections, loyalties, interests, and
comforts entirely beyond its animal destiny, would have no such doubts.
It will be noted that the man (I am speaking throughout of the good man)
takes all these pains with the dog, and gives all these pains to the dog,
only because it is an animal high in the scale—because it is so nearly
lovable that it is worth his while to make it fully lovable. He does not
house-train the earwig or give baths to centipedes. We may wish, indeed,
that we were of so little account to God that He left us alone to follow
our natural impulses—that He would give over trying to train us into
something so unlike our natural selves: but once again, we are asking not
for more Love, but for less.

A nobler analogy, sanctioned by the constant tenor of Our Lord’s
teaching, is that between God’s love for man and a father’s love for a
son. Whenever this is used, however (that is, whenever we pray the Lord’s
Prayer), it must be remembered that the Saviour used it in a time and
place where paternal authority stood much higher than it does in modern
England. A father half apologetic for having brought his son into the
world, afraid to restrain him lest he should create inhibitions or even
to instruct him lest he should interfere with his independence of mind,
is a most misleading symbol of the Divine Fatherhood. I am not here
discussing whether the authority of fathers, in its ancient extent, was a
good thing or a bad thing: I am only explaining what the conception of
Fatherhood would have meant to Our Lord’s first hearers, and indeed to
their successors for many centuries. And it will become even plainer if
we consider how Our Lord (though, in our belief, one with His Father and
co-eternal with Him as no earthly son is with an earthly father) regards
His own Sonship, surrendering His will wholly to the paternal will and
not even allowing Himself to be called “good” because Good is the name of
the Father. Love between father and son, in this symbol, means
essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the
other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of
human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.
Even in our own days, though a man might say, he could mean nothing by
saying, “I love my son but don’t care how great a blackguard he is
provided he has a good time.”

Finally we come to an analogy full of danger, and of much more limited
application, which happens, nevertheless, to be the most useful for our
special purpose at the moment—I mean, the analogy between God’s love for
man and a man’s love for a woman. It is freely used in Scripture. Israel
is a false wife, but Her heavenly Husband cannot forget the happier days;
“I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thy espousals,
when thou wentest after Me in the wilderness.”[17] Israel is the pauper
bride, the waif whom Her lover found abandoned by the wayside, and
clothed and adorned and made lovely and yet she betrayed Him.[18]
“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”.[19] The Church is the Lord’s bride whom He so loves
that in her no spot or wrinkle is endurable.[20] 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. When we fall in love with a woman, do we cease
to care whether she is clean or dirty, fair or foul? Do we not rather
then first begin to care? Does any woman regard it as a sign of love in a
man that he neither knows nor cares how she is looking? Love may, indeed,
love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost.
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but
Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than
hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved; his “feeling is more soft
and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails”. Of all powers
he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but
demands all.

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. The great
spirit you so lightly invoked, the “lord of terrible aspect”, is present:
not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own
way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the
care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but
the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as
the artist’s love for his work and despotic as a man’s love for a dog,
provident and venerable as a father’s love for a child, jealous,
inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do
not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say
creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their
Creator’s eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our
deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring;
we are inclined, like the maidens in the old play, to deprecate the love
of Zeus.[21] But the fact seems unquestionable. The Impassible speaks as
if it suffered passion, and that which contains in Itself the cause of
its own and all other bliss talks as though it could be in want and
yearning. “Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I
spake against him I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels
are troubled for him.”[22] “How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall
I abandon thee, Israel? Mine heart is turned within me.”[23] “Oh
Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as
a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not.”[24]

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God
who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to
the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them.
Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does
not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy
pleasure they are and were created.”[25] 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. We cannot even wish, in our better moments,
that He could reconcile Himself to our present impurities—no more than
the beggar maid could wish that King Cophetua should be content with her
rags and dirt, or a dog, once having learned to love man, could wish that
man were such as to tolerate in his house the snapping, verminous,
polluting creature of the wild pack. What we would here and now call our
“happiness” is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such
as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.

I plainly foresee that the course of my argument may provoke a protest. I
had promised that in coming to understand the Divine goodness we should
not be asked to accept a mere reversal of our own ethics. But it may be
objected that a reversal is precisely what we have been asked to accept.
The kind of love which I attribute to God, it may be said, is just the
kind which in human beings we describe as “selfish” or “possessive”, and
contrast unfavourably with another kind which seeks first the happiness
of the beloved and not the contentment of the lover. I am not sure that
this is quite how I feel even about human love. I do not think I should
value much the love of a friend who cared only for my happiness and did
not object to my becoming dishonest. Nevertheless, the protest is
welcome, and the answer to it will put the subject in a new light, and
correct what has been one-sided in our discussion.

The truth is that this antithesis between egoistic and altruistic love
cannot be unambiguously applied to the love of God for His creatures.
Clashes of interest, and therefore opportunities either of selfishness or
unselfishness, occur only between beings inhabiting a common world: God
can no more be in competition with a creature than Shakespeare can be in
competition with Viola. When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature
among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of
supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary. A modern pantheistic
philosopher has said, “When the Absolute falls into the sea it becomes a
fish”; in the same way, we Christians can point to the Incarnation and
say that when God empties Himself of His glory and submits to those
conditions under which alone egoism and altruism have a clear meaning, He
is seen to be wholly altruistic. But God in His transcendence—God as the
unconditioned ground of all conditions—cannot easily be thought of in the
same way. We call human love selfish when it satisfies its own needs at
the expense of the object’s needs—as when a father keeps at home, because
he cannot bear to relinquish their society, children who ought, in their
own interests, to be put out into the world. The situation implies a need
or passion on the part of the lover, an incompatible need on the part of
the beloved, and the lover’s disregard or culpable ignorance of the
beloved’s need. None of these conditions is present in the relation of
God to man. 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 the goodness
which the object has, loving it first into existence and then into real,
though derivative, loveability. 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. Hence, if God sometimes speaks as though the
Impassible could suffer passion and eternal fullness could be in want,
and in want of those beings on whom it bestows all from their bare
existence upwards, this can mean only, if it means anything intelligible
by us, that God of mere miracle has made Himself able so to hunger and
created in Himself that which we can satisfy. If He requires us, the
requirement is of His own choosing. If the immutable heart can be grieved
by the puppets of its own making, it is Divine Omnipotence, no other,
that has so subjected it, freely, and in a humility that passes
understanding. If the world exists not chiefly that we may love God but
that God may love us, yet that very fact, on a deeper level, is so for
our sakes. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it
is because we need to be needed. Before and behind all the relations of
God to man, as we now learn them from Christianity, yawns the abyss of a
Divine act of pure giving—the election of man, from nonentity, to be the
beloved of God, and therefore (in some sense) the needed and desired of
God, who but for that act needs and desires nothing, since He eternally
has, and is, all goodness. And that act is for our sakes. It is good for
us to know love; and best for us to know the love of the best object,
God. But to know it as a love in which we were primarily the wooers and
God the wooed, in which we sought and He was found, in which His
conformity to our needs, not ours to His, came first, would be to know it
in a form false to the very nature of things. For We are only creatures:
our _rôle_ must always be that of patient to agent, female to male,
mirror to light, echo to voice. Our highest activity must be response,
not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an
illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His
demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite
way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being. I do not
deny, of course, that on a certain level we may rightly speak of the
soul’s search for God, and of God as receptive of the soul’s love: but in
the long run the soul’s search for God can only be a mode, or appearance
(_Erscheinung_) of His search for her, since all comes from Him, since
the very possibility of our loving is His gift to us, and since our
freedom is only a freedom of better or worse response. Hence I think that
nothing marks off Pagan theism from Christianity so sharply as
Aristotle’s doctrine that God moves the universe, Himself unmoving, as
the Beloved moves a lover.[26] But for Christendom “Herein is love, not
that we loved God but that He loved us”.[27]

The first condition, then, of what is called a selfish love among men is
lacking with God. He has no natural necessities, no passion, to compete
with His wish for the beloved’s welfare: or if there is in Him something
which we have to imagine after the analogy of a passion, a want, it is
there by His own will and for our sakes. And the second condition is
lacking too. The real interests of a child may differ from that which his
father’s affection instinctively demands, because the child is a separate
being from the father with a nature which has its own needs and does not
exist solely for the father nor find its whole perfection in being loved
by him, and which the father does not fully understand. But creatures are
not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The
place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they
are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their
happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the
anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God
wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.
Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a
despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshall us where we
should want to go if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our
obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good,
or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring
about “His glory’s diminution”? A man can no more diminish God’s glory by
refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling
the word “darkness” on the walls of his cell. But God wills our 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. If we do not, that only shows that what we are trying
to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God
which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to
prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a
creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our
present desires. We are bidden 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.

Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply
that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather
God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find
its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper
to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature’s nature:
but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream.
George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as
saying to men “You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my
blessedness, _for I have no other to give you_.” That is the conclusion
of the whole matter. God gives 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 not learn to
eat the only food that the universe grows—the only food that any possible
universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally.

 IV. HUMAN WICKEDNESS

You can have no greater sign of a confirmed pride than when you think you
are humble enough.
                                          Law. _Serious Call_, cap. XVI.

The examples given in the last chapter went to show that love may cause
pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs
alteration to become fully lovable. Now why do we men need so much
alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to
become very bad—is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. But
to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern men, and
even of modern Christians, is very hard. When the apostles preached, they
could assume even in their Pagan hearers a real consciousness of
deserving the Divine anger. The Pagan mysteries existed to allay this
consciousness, and the Epicurean philosophy claimed to deliver men from
the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the
Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to men
who knew that they were mortally ill. But all this has changed.
Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad
news—before it can win a hearing for the cure.

There are two principal causes. One is the fact that for about a hundred
years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues—“kindness” or
mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really
good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such lopsided ethical
developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet
virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated
at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy—for
every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for
cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names
such as “Humanitarianism” and “Sentimentality”. 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” and “he wouldn’t hurt a fly”, 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.

The second cause is the effect of Psycho-analysis on the public mind,
and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibitions. Whatever
these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on
most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous
thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire
to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all
mankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We
are told to “get things out into the open”, not for the sake of
self-humiliation, but on the ground that these “things” are very natural
and we need not be ashamed of them. But unless Christianity is wholly
false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must
be the only true one; and even Pagan society has usually recognised
“shamelessness” as the nadir of the soul. In trying to extirpate Shame we
have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting
in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled
the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but
to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work to remove
hypocrisy by removing the _temptation_ to hypocrisy: the “frankness” of
people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness.

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. 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 addressed. We
lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And
when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness
of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God
as to one who is always making impossible demands and always inexplicably
angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying
farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking
“What harm have I ever done _Him_?” There is the real rub. The worst we
have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the
compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings,
to be “angry”? It’s easy for Him to be good!

Now at the moment whan a man feels real guilt—moments too rare in our
lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be
excused to human infirmities: but not _this_—this incredibly mean and
ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a
thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we
would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really
do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to
be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them.
A God who did not regard this 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 again delight any creature, because our own breath
happens to stink.

When we merely _say_ that we are bad, the “wrath” of God seems a
barbarous doctrine; as soon as we _perceive_ our badness, it appears
inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us
the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to
learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more
of its complex disguises, is therefore indispensable to a real
understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new
doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am
merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a _pons
asinorum_—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter
illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I
must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less
incredible.

1. We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose
ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a
decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out
loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are
probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think
you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison
is suspicious: he is probably head and shoulders above you and your
circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear “not bad”. How
far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be
deceptive: you know that yours is. Does this seem to you a mere trick,
because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that
is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to
“live up to” the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that
within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour,
even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates
for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the
whole truth. We may confess ugly _facts_—the meanest cowardice or the
shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the _tone_ is false. The very act
of confessing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all
this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could
guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things
were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming
inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd
and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned
into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are
exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our
virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his “bad
days” and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it
is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the
persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed
and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important
thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for
a full account of the worst that is inside.

2. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private
or domestic conceptions of morality, a re-awakening of the _social_
conscience. We feel ourselves to be involved in an iniquitous social
system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy
can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use
of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those
hum-drum, old fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with
“the system” and which can be dealt with without waiting for the
millennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and certainly is not,
felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now
are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we
have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can
go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too
much. But we must learn to walk before we run.

3. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard
others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods
committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s,
and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or
to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by
repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins
we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the
fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are
eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one
line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery
pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a
schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a
subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of
these eternal moments but in the perfected humility that bears the shame
forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it furnished to God’s compassion
and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in
that eternal moment St. Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong—forever
denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven
are for most of us, in our present condition, “an acquired taste”—and
certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition.
Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a _public_ place. Of
course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is
worth keeping in mind.

4. We must guard against the feeling that there is “safety in numbers”.
It is natural to feel that if _all_ men are as bad as the Christians say,
then badness must be very excusable. If all the boys plough in the
examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the
masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools
where ninety per cent. of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they
begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again,
many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of
human society—some particular school, college, regiment or profession
where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were
regarded as merely normal (“Everyone does it”) and certain others as
impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad
society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our
“normal” was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of
doing, and our “Quixotic” was taken for granted as the minimum standard
of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long
as we were in the “pocket” now turned out to be the only moments of
sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the
whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just
such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside
which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for
pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian
doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first
place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local
standard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite different
behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that
these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a
suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if
they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket.
What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gotama, Christ[28] and
Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty substantial. Thirdly, we find in
ourselves even now a theoretical approval of this behaviour which no one
practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy,
fortitude, and temperance are of _no_ value, but only that the local
custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be
expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside
this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the
term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opinion of that
larger world. But the worst of all is this; we cannot help seeing that
only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can
possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard
which seems to have come into the “pocket” from outside, turns out to be
terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a
consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would
fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment,
and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down
here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of
perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when
we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life.
It is then that we shall envy the “morbid” person, the “pedant” or
“enthusiast” who really _has_ taught his company to shoot and dig in and
spare their water bottles.

5. The larger society to which I here contrast the human “pocket” may not
exist according to some people, and at any rate we have no experience of
it. We do not meet angels, or unfallen races. But we can get some inkling
of the truth even inside our own race. Different ages and cultures can be
regarded as “pockets” in relation to one another. I said, a few pages
back, that different ages excelled in different virtues. If, then, you
are ever tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really
be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane—if, in
other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground—ask
yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the
cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You
will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the
cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling how our
softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence
how both must look to God.

6. Perhaps my harping on the word “kindness” has already aroused a
protest in some readers’ minds. Are we not really an increasingly cruel
age? Perhaps we are: but I think we have become so in the attempt to
reduce all virtues to kindness. For Plato rightly taught that virtue is
one. You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. If, being
cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done a fellow
creature great mischief, that is only because your neighbour’s welfare
has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or
ease. Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not
controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most
atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy’s atrocities; and pity
for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole,
leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign
of terror.

7. Some modern theologians have, quite rightly, protested against an
excessively moralistic interpretation of Christianity. The Holiness of
God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us
is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. I do not deny
it: but this conception, like that of corporate guilt, is very easily
used as an evasion of the real issue. God may be more than moral
goodness: He is not less. The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.
The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending
it for those who have not first admitted its claims upon them, and then
tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely
faced the fact of their failure.

8. “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God.”[29] Many
schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our
behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature
of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of
this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an
unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine
that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I
have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience
to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be
necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to men.
This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect
obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us.
Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the
last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must
not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently
concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple
statement: “if you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as
pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you,
that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because
you never thoroughly intended it.”[30]

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a
reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that
doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total
we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because
experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending
universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion
but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should
be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that
attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual
direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own
idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either
arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards
concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and
hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by
needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by
anything else. 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. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I
have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually 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. This I
believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more
fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this
humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a
most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you
identify a virtue (_i.e._, a perfection) with an illusion (_i.e._, an
imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous
because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own
corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head.
No; depend upon it, when the saints say that they—even they—are vile,
they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.

How did this state of affairs come about? In the next chapter I shall
give as much as I can understand of the Christian answer to that
question.




V. THE FALL OF MAN


To obey is the proper office of a rational soul.
                                                    _Montaigne_ II, xii.

The Christian answer to the question proposed in the last chapter is
contained in the doctrine of the Fall. According to that doctrine, man is
now a horror to God and to himself and a creature ill-adapted to the
universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so
by the abuse of his free will. To my mind this is the sole function of
the doctrine. It exists to guard against two sub-Christian theories of
the origin of evil—Monism, according to which God Himself, being “above
good and evil”, produces impartially the effects to which we give those
two names, and Dualism, according to which God produces good, while some
equal and independent Power produces evil. Against both these views
Christianity asserts that God is good; that He made all things good and
for the sake of their goodness; that one of the good things He made,
namely, the free will of rational creatures, by its very nature included
the possibility of evil; and that creatures, availing themselves of this
possibility, have become evil. Now this function—which is the only one I
allow to the doctrine of the Fall—must be distinguished from two other
functions which it is sometimes, perhaps, represented as performing, but
which I reject. In the first place, I do not think the doctrine answers
the question “Was it better for God to create than not to create?” That
is a question I have already declined. Since I believe God to be good, I
am sure that, if the question has a meaning, the answer must be Yes. But
I doubt whether the question has any meaning: and even if it has, I am
sure that the answer cannot be attained by the sort of value-judgements
which men can significantly make. In the second place, I do not think the
doctrine of the Fall can be used to show that it is “just”, in terms of
retributive justice, to punish individuals for the faults of their remote
ancestors. Some forms of the doctrine seem to involve this; but I
question whether any of them, as understood by its exponents, really
meant it. The Fathers may sometimes say that we are punished for Adam’s
sin: but they much more often say that _we_ sinned “in Adam”. It may be
impossible to find out what they meant by this, or we may decide that
what they meant was erroneous. But I do not think we can dismiss their
way of talking as a mere “idiom”. Wisely, or foolishly, they believed
that we were _really_—and not simply by legal fiction—involved in Adam’s
action. The attempt to formulate this belief by saying that we were “in”
Adam in a physical sense—Adam being the first vehicle of the “immortal
germ plasm”—may be unacceptable: but it is, of course, a further question
whether the belief itself is merely a confusion or a real insight into
spiritual realities beyond our normal grasp. At the moment, however, this
question does not arise; for, as I have said I have no intention of
arguing that the descent to modern man of inabilities contracted by his
remote ancestors is a specimen of retributive justice. For me it is
rather a specimen of those things necessarily involved in the creation of
a stable world which we considered in Chapter II. It would, no doubt,
have been possible for God to remove by miracle the results of the first
sin ever committed by a human being; but this would not have been much
good unless He was prepared to remove the results of the second sin, and
of the third, and so on forever. If the miracles ceased, then sooner or
later we might have reached our present lamentable situation: if they did
not, then a world, thus continually underpropped and corrected by Divine
interference, would have been a world in which nothing important ever
depended on human choice, and in which choice itself would soon cease
from the certainty that one of the apparent alternatives before you would
lead to no results and was therefore not really an alternative. As we
saw, the chess player’s freedom to play chess depends on the rigidity of
the squares and the moves.

Having isolated what I conceive to be the true import of the doctrine
that Man is fallen, let us now consider the doctrine in itself. The story
in Genesis is a story (full of the deepest suggestion) about a magic
apple of knowledge; but in the developed doctrine the inherent magic of
the apple has quite dropped out of sight, and the story is simply one of
disobedience. I have the deepest respect even for Pagan myths, still more
for myths in Holy Scripture. I therefore do not doubt that the version
which emphasises the magic apple, and brings together the trees of life
and knowledge, contains a deeper and subtler truth than the version which
makes the apple simply and solely a pledge of obedience. But I assume
that the Holy Spirit would not have allowed the latter to grow up in the
Church and win the assent of great doctors unless it also was true and
useful as far as it went. It is this version which I am going to discuss,
because, though I suspect the primitive version to be far more profound,
I know that I, at any rate, cannot penetrate its profundities. I am to
give my readers not the best absolutely but the best I have.

In the developed doctrine, then, it is claimed that Man, as God made him,
was completely good and completely happy, but that he disobeyed God and
became what we now see. Many people think that this proposition has been
proved false by modern science. “We now know”, it is said, “that so far
from having fallen out of a primeval state of virtue and happiness, men
have slowly risen from brutality and savagery.” There seems to me to be a
complete confusion here. _Brute_ and _savage_ both belong to that
unfortunate class of words which are sometimes used rhetorically, as
terms of reproach, and sometimes scientifically, as terms of description;
and the pseudo-scientific argument against the Fall depends on a
confusion between the usages. If by saying that man rose from brutality
you mean simply that man is physically descended from animals, I have no
objection. But it does not follow that the further back you go the more
_brutal_—in the sense of wicked or wretched—you will find man to be. No
animal has moral virtue: but it is not true that all animal behaviour is
of the kind one should call “wicked” if it were practised by men. On the
contrary, not all animals treat other creatures of their own species as
badly as men treat men. Not all are as gluttonous or lecherous as we, and
no animal is ambitious. Similarly if you say that the first men were
“savages”, meaning by this that their artefacts were few and clumsy like
those of modern “savages”, you may well be right; but if you mean that
they were “savage” in the sense of being lewd, ferocious, cruel, and
treacherous, you will be going beyond your evidence, and that for two
reasons. In the first place, modern anthropologists and missionaries are
less inclined than their fathers to endorse your unfavourable picture
even of the modern savage. In the second place you cannot argue from the
artefacts of the earliest men that they were in all respects like the
contemporary peoples who make similar artefacts. We must be on our guard
here against an illusion which the study of prehistoric man seems
naturally to beget. Prehistoric man, because he is prehistoric, is known
to us only by the material things he made—or rather by a chance selection
from among the more durable things he made. It is not the fault of
archæologists that they have no better evidence: but this penury
constitutes a continual temptation to infer more than we have any right
to infer, to assume that the community which made the superior artefacts
was superior in all respects. Everyone can see that the assumption is
false; it would lead to the conclusion that the leisured classes of our
own time were in all respects superior to those of the Victorian age.
Clearly the prehistoric men who made the worst pottery might have made
the best poetry and we should never know it. And the assumption becomes
even more absurd when we are comparing prehistoric men with modern
savages. The equal crudity of artefacts here tells you nothing about the
intelligence or virtue of the makers. What is learned by trial and error
must begin by being crude, whatever the character of the beginner. The
very same pot which would prove its maker a genius if it were the first
pot ever made in the world, would prove its maker a dunce if it came
after millenniums of pot-making. The whole modern estimate of primitive
man is based upon that idolatry of artefacts which is a great corporate
sin of our own civilisation. We forget that our prehistoric ancestors
made all the most useful discoveries, except that of chloroform, which
have ever been made. To them we owe language, the family, clothing, the
use of fire, the domestication of animals, the wheel, the ship, poetry
and agriculture.

Science, then, has nothing to say either for or against the doctrine of
the Fall. A more philosophical difficulty has been raised by the modern
theologian to whom all students of the subject are most indebted.[31]
This writer points out that the idea of sin presupposes a law to sin
against: and since it would take centuries for the “herd-instinct” to
crystallise into custom and for custom to harden into law, the first
man—if there ever was a being who could be so described—could not commit
the first sin. This argument assumes that virtue and the herd-instinct
commonly coincide, and that the “first sin” was essentially a _social_
sin. But the traditional doctrine points to a sin against God, an act of
disobedience, not a sin against the neighbour. And certainly, if we are
to hold the doctrine of the Fall in any real sense, we must look for the
great sin on a deeper and more timeless level than that of social
morality.

This sin has been described by Saint Augustine as the result of Pride, of
the movement whereby a creature (that is, an essentially dependent being
whose principle of existence lies not in itself but in another) tries to
set up on its own, to exist for itself.[32] Such a sin requires no
complex social conditions, no extended experience, no great intellectual
development. 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. This sin is committed daily by young children
and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries
no less than by those who live in society: 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. We try, when we
wake, to lay the new day at God’s feet; before we have finished shaving,
it becomes _our_ day and God’s share in it is felt as a tribute which we
must pay out of “our own” pocket, a deduction from the time which ought,
we feel, to be “our own”. A man starts a new job with a sense of vocation
and, perhaps, for the first week still keeps the discharge of the
vocation as his end, taking the pleasures and pains from God’s hand, as
they come, as “accidents”. But in the second week he is beginning to
“know the ropes”: by the third, he has quarried out of the total job his
own plan for himself within that job, and when he can pursue this he
feels that he is getting no more than his rights, and, when he cannot,
that he is being interfered with. A lover, in obedience to a quite
uncalculating impulse, which may be full of good will as well as of
desire and need not be forgetful of God, embraces his beloved, and then,
quite innocently, experiences a thrill of sexual pleasure; but the second
embrace may have that pleasure in view, may be a means to an end, may be
the first downward step towards the state of regarding a fellow creature
as a thing, as a machine to be used for his pleasure. Thus the bloom of
innocence, the element of obedience and the readiness to take what comes
is rubbed off every activity. Thoughts undertaken for God’s sake—like
that on which we are engaged at the moment—are continued as if they were
an end in themselves, and then as if our pleasure in thinking were the
end, and finally as if our pride or celebrity were the end. Thus all day
long, and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling
away—as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclined
plane on which there is no resting. And indeed we are now of such a
nature that we must slip off, and the sin, because it is unavoidable, may
be venial. But God cannot have made us so. The gravitation away from God,
“the journey homeward to habitual self”, must, we think, be a product of
the Fall. What exactly happened when Man fell, we do not know; but if it
is legitimate to guess, I offer the following picture—a “myth” in the
Socratic sense,[33] a not unlikely tale.

For long centuries God perfected the animal form which was to become the
vehicle of humanity and the image of Himself. He gave it hands whose
thumb could be applied to each of the fingers, and jaws and teeth and
throat capable of articulation, and a brain sufficiently complex to
execute all the material motions whereby rational thought is incarnated.
The creature may have existed for ages in this state before it became
man: it may even have been clever enough to make things which a modern
archæologist would accept as proof of its humanity. But it was only an
animal because all its physical and psychical processes were directed to
purely material and natural ends. Then, in the fullness of time, God
caused to descend upon this organism, both on its psychology and
physiology, a new kind of consciousness which could say “I” and “me”,
which could look upon itself as an object, which knew God, which could
make judgements of truth, beauty, and goodness, and which was so far
above time that it could perceive time flowing past. This new
consciousness ruled and illuminated the whole organism, flooding every
part of it with light, and was not, like ours, limited to a selection of
the movements going on in one part of the organism, namely the brain. Man
was then all consciousness. The modern Yogi claims—whether falsely or
truly—to have under control those functions which to us are almost part
of the external world, such as digestion and circulation. This power the
first man had in eminence. His organic processes obeyed the law of his
own will, not the law of nature. His organs sent up appetites to the
judgement seat of will not because they had to, but because he chose.
Sleep meant to him not the stupor which we undergo, but willed and
conscious repose—he remained awake to enjoy the pleasure and duty of
sleep. Since the processes of decay and repair in his tissues were
similarly conscious and obedient, it may not be fanciful to suppose that
the length of his life was largely at his own discretion. Wholly
commanding himself, he commanded all lower lives with which he came into
contact. Even now we meet rare individuals who have a mysterious power of
taming beasts. This power the Paradisal man enjoyed in eminence. The old
picture of the brutes sporting before Adam and fawning upon him may not
be wholly symbolical. Even now more animals than you might expect are
ready to adore man if they are given a reasonable opportunity: for man
was made to be the priest and even, in one sense, the Christ, of the
animals—the mediator through whom they apprehend so much of the Divine
splendour as their irrational nature allows. And God was to such a man no
slippery, inclined plane. The new consciousness had been made to repose
on its Creator, and repose it did. However rich and varied man’s
experience of his fellows (or fellow) in charity and friendship and
sexual love, or of the beasts, or of the surrounding world then first
recognised as beautiful and awful, God came first in his love and in his
thought, and that without painful effort. In perfect cyclic movement,
being, power and joy descended from God to man in the form of gift and
returned from man to God in the form of obedient love and ecstatic
adoration: and in this sense, though not in all, man was then truly the
son of God, the prototype of Christ, perfectly enacting in joy and ease
of all the faculties and all the senses that filial self-surrender which
Our Lord enacted in the agonies of the crucifixion.

Judged by his artefacts, or perhaps even by his language, this blessed
creature was, no doubt, a savage. All that experience and practice can
teach he had still to learn: if he chipped flints, he doubtless chipped
them clumsily enough. He may have been utterly incapable of expressing in
conceptual form his paradisal experience. All that is quite irrelevant.
From our own childhood we remember that before our elders thought us
capable of “understanding” anything, we already had spiritual experiences
as pure and as momentous as any we have undergone since, though not, of
course, as rich in factual context. From Christianity itself we learn
that there is a level—in the long run the only level of importance—on
which the learned and the adult have no advantage at all over the simple
and the child. I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear
among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be
exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest
among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded,
slow-spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his
feet.

We do not know how many of these creatures God made, nor how long they
continued in the Paradisal state. But sooner or later they fell. Someone
or something whispered that they could become as gods—that they could
cease directing their lives to their Creator and taking all their
delights as uncovenanted mercies, as “accidents” (in the logical sense)
which arose in the course of a life directed not to those delights but to
the adoration of God. As a young man wants a regular allowance from his
father which he can count on as his own, within which he makes his own
plans (and rightly, for his father is after all a fellow creature) so
they desired to be on their own, to take care for their own future, to
plan for pleasure and for security, to have a _meum_ from which, no
doubt, they would pay some reasonable tribute to God in the way of time,
attention, and love, but which nevertheless, was theirs not His. 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. We have no
idea in what particular act, or series of acts, the self-contradictory,
impossible wish found expression. For all I can see, it might have
concerned the literal eating of a fruit, but the question is of no
consequence.

This act of self-will on the part of the creature, which constitutes an
utter falseness to its true creaturely position, is the only sin that can
be conceived as the Fall. For the difficulty about the first sin is that
it must be very heinous, or its consequences would not be so terrible,
and yet it must be something which a being free from the temptations of
fallen man could conceivably have committed. The turning from God to self
fulfills both conditions. It is a sin possible even to Paradisal man,
because the mere existence of a self—the mere fact that we call it
“me”—includes, from the first, the danger of self-idolatry. Since I am I,
I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in
living to God rather than to myself. This is, if you like, the “weak
spot” in the very nature of creation, the risk which God apparently
thinks worth taking. But the sin was very heinous, because the self which
Paradisal man had to surrender contained no natural recalcitrancy to
being surrendered. His _data_, so to speak, were a psycho-physical
organism wholly subject to the will and a will wholly disposed, though
not compelled, to turn to God. The self-surrender which he practised
before the Fall meant no struggle but only the delicious overcoming of an
infinitesimal self-adherence which delighted to be overcome—of which we
see a dim analogy in the rapturous mutual self-surrenders of lovers even
now. He had, therefore, no _temptation_ (in our sense) to choose the
self—no passion or inclination obstinately inclining that way—nothing but
the bare fact that the self was _him_self.

Up to that moment the human spirit had been in full control of the human
organism. It doubtless expected that it would retain this control when it
had ceased to obey God. But its authority over the organism was a
delegated authority which it lost when it ceased to be God’s delegate.
Having cut itself off, as far as it could, from the source of its being,
it had cut itself off from the source of power. For when we say of
created things that A rules B this must mean that God rules B through A.
I doubt whether it would have been intrinsically possible for God to
continue to rule the organism _through_ the human spirit when the human
spirit was in revolt against Him. At any rate He did not. He began to
rule the organism in a more external way, not by the laws of spirit, but
by those of nature.[34] Thus the organs, no longer governed by man’s
will, fell under the control of ordinary biochemical laws and suffered
whatever the inter-workings of those laws might bring about in the way of
pain, senility and death. And desires began to come up into the mind of
man, not as his reason chose, but just as the biochemical and
environmental facts happened to cause them. And the mind itself fell
under the psychological laws of association and the like which God had
made to rule the psychology of the higher anthropoids. And the will,
caught in the tidal wave of mere nature, had no resource but to force
back some of the new thoughts and desires by main strength, and these
uneasy rebels became the subconscious as we now know it. The process was
not, I conceive, comparable to mere deterioration as it may now occur in
a human individual; it was a loss of status as a _species_. What man lost
by the Fall was his original specific nature. “Dust thou art, and unto
dust shalt thou return.” The total organism which had been taken up into
his spiritual life was allowed to fall back into the merely natural
condition from which, at his making, it had been raised—just as, far
earlier in the story of creation, God had raised vegetable life to become
the vehicle of animality, and chemical process to be the vehicle of
vegetation, and physical process to be the vehicle of chemical. Thus
human spirit from being the master of human nature became a mere lodger
in its own house, or even a prisoner; rational consciousness became what
it now is—a fitful spot-light resting on a small part of the cerebral
motions. But this limitation of the spirit’s powers was a lesser evil
than the corruption of the spirit itself. It had turned from God and
become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God,[35]
it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward.
Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be lovely in its own eyes and to
depress and humiliate all rivals, envy, and restless search for more, and
still more, security, were now the attitudes that came easiest to it. It
was not only a weak king over its own nature, but a bad one: it sent down
into the psycho-physical organism desires far worse than the organism
sent up in to it. This condition was transmitted by heredity to all later
generations, for it was not simply what biologists call an acquired
variation; it was the emergence of a new kind of man—a new species, never
made by God, had sinned itself into existence. The change which man had
undergone was not parallel to the development of a new organ or a new
habit; it was a radical alteration of his constitution, a disturbance of
the relation between his component parts, and an internal perversion of
one of them.

God might have arrested this process by miracle: but this—to speak in
somewhat irreverent metaphor—would have been to decline the problem which
God had set Himself when He created the world, the problem of expressing
His goodness through the total drama of a world containing free agents,
in spite of, and by means of, their rebellion against Him. The symbol of
a drama, a symphony, or a dance, is here useful to correct a certain
absurdity which may arise if we talk too much of God planning and
creating the world process for good and of that good being frustrated by
the free will of the creatures. This may raise the ridiculous idea that
the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else—more
ridiculously still—that God planned the whole thing for conditions which,
He well knew, were never going to be realised. In fact, of course, God
saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula. The world is
a dance in which good, descending from God, is disturbed by evil arising
from the creatures, and the resulting conflict is resolved by God’s own
assumption of the suffering nature which evil produces. The doctrine of
the free Fall asserts that the evil which thus makes the fuel or raw
material for the second and more complex kind of good is not God’s
contribution but man’s. This does not mean that if man had remained
innocent God could not then have contrived an equally splendid symphonic
whole—supposing that we insist on asking such questions. But it must
always be remembered that when we talk of what might have happened, of
contingencies outside the whole actuality, we do not really know what we
are talking about. There are no times or places outside the existing
universe in which all this “could happen” or “could have happened”. I
think the most significant way of stating the real freedom of man is to
say that if there are other rational species than man, existing in some
other part of the actual universe, then it is not necessary to suppose
that they also have fallen.

Our present condition, then, is explained by the fact that we are members
of a spoiled species. I do not mean that our sufferings are a punishment
for being what we cannot now help being nor that we are morally
responsible for the rebellion of a remote ancestor. If, none the less, I
call our present condition one of original Sin, and not merely one of
original misfortune, that is because our actual religious experience does
not allow us to regard it in any other way. Theoretically, I suppose, we
might say “Yes: we behave like vermin, but then that is because we _are_
vermin. And that, at any rate, is not our fault.” But the fact that we
are vermin, so far from being felt as an excuse, is a greater shame and
grief to us than any of the particular acts which it leads us to commit.
The situation is not nearly so hard to understand as some people make
out. It arises among human beings whenever a very badly brought up boy is
introduced into a decent family. They rightly remind themselves that it
is “not his own fault” that he is a bully, a coward, a tale-bearer and a
liar. But none the less, however it came there, his present character is
detestable. They not only hate it, but ought to hate it. They cannot love
him for what he is, they can only try to turn him into what he is not. In
the meantime, though the boy is most unfortunate in having been so
brought up, you cannot quite call his character a “misfortune” as if he
were one thing and his character another. It is he—he himself—who bullies
and sneaks and likes doing it. And if he begins to mend he will
inevitably feel shame and guilt at what he is just beginning to cease to
be.

With this I have said all that can be said on the level at which alone I
feel able to treat the subject of the Fall. But I warn my readers once
more that this level is a shallow one. We have said nothing about the
trees of life and of knowledge which doubtless conceal some great
mystery: and we have said nothing about the Pauline statement that “as in
Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive”.[36] It is this
passage which lies behind the Patristic doctrine of our physical presence
in Adam’s loins and Anselm’s doctrine of our inclusion, by legal fiction,
in the suffering Christ. These theories may have done good in their day
but they do no good to me, and I am not going to invent others. We have
recently been told by the scientists that we have no right to expect that
the real universe should be picturable, and that if we make mental
pictures to illustrate quantum physics we are moving further away from
reality, not nearer to it.[37] We have clearly even less right to demand
that the highest spiritual realities should be picturable, or even
explicable in terms of our abstract thought. I observe that the
difficulty of the Pauline formula turns on the word _in_, and that this
word, again and again in the New Testament, is used in senses we cannot
fully understand. That we can die “in” Adam and live “in” Christ seems to
me to imply that man, as he really is, differs a good deal from man as
our categories of thought and our three dimensional imaginations
represent him; that the separateness—modified only by causal
relations—which we discern between individuals, is balanced, in absolute
reality, by some kind of “inter-inanimation” of which we have no
conception at all. It may be that the acts and sufferings of great
archetypal individuals such as Adam and Christ are ours, not by legal
fiction, metaphor, or causality, but in some much deeper fashion. There
is no question, of course, of individuals melting down into a kind of
spiritual continuum such as Pantheistic systems believe in; that is
excluded by the whole tenor of our faith. But there may be a tension
between individuality and some other principle. We believe that the Holy
Spirit can be really present and operative in the human spirit, but we do
not, like Pantheists, take this to mean that we are “parts” or
“modifications” or “appearances” of God. We may have to suppose, in the
long run, that something of the same kind is true, in its appropriate
degree, even of created spirits, that each, though distinct, is really
present in all, or in some, others—just as we may have to admit “action
at a distance” into our conception of matter. Everyone will have noticed
how the Old Testament seems at times to ignore our conception of the
individual. When God promises Jacob that “He will go down with him into
Egypt and will also surely bring him up again”,[38] this is fulfilled
either by the burial of Jacob’s body in Palestine or by the exodus of
Jacob’s descendants from Egypt. It is quite right to connect this notion
with the social structure of early communities in which the individual is
constantly overlooked in favour of the tribe or family: but we ought to
express this connection by two propositions of equal importance—firstly
that their social experience blinded the ancients to some truths which we
perceive, and secondly that it made them sensible of some truths to which
we are blind. Legal fiction, adoption, and transference or imputation of
merit and guilt, could never have played the part they did play in
theology if they had always been felt to be so artificial as we now feel
them to be.

I have thought it right to allow this one glance at what is for me an
impenetrable curtain, but, as I have said, it makes no part of my present
argument. Clearly it would be futile to attempt to solve the problem of
pain by producing another problem. The thesis of this chapter is simply
that man, as a species, spoiled himself, and that good, to us in our
present state, must therefore mean primarily remedial or corrective good.
What part pain actually plays in such remedy or correction, is now to be
considered.




VI. HUMAN PAIN


Since the life of Christ is every way most bitter to nature and the Self
and the Me (for in the true life of Christ, the Self and the Me and
nature must be forsaken and lost and die altogether), therefore in each
of us, nature hath a horror of it.
                                              _Theologia Germanica_, XX.

I have tried to show in a previous chapter that the possibility of pain
is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. When
souls become wicked they will certainly use this possibility to hurt one
another; and this, perhaps, accounts for four-fifths of the sufferings of
men. It is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons,
slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; it is by human avarice or human
stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and
overwork. But there remains, none the less, much suffering which cannot
thus be traced to ourselves. Even if all suffering were man-made, we
should like to know the reason for the enormous permission to torture
their fellows which God gives to the worst of men.[39] To say, as was
said in the last chapter, that good, for such creatures as we now are,
means primarily corrective or remedial good, is an incomplete answer. Not
all medicine tastes nasty: or if it did, that is itself one of the
unpleasant facts for which we should like to know the reason.

Before proceeding I must pick up a point made in Chapter II. I there said
that pain, below a certain level of intensity, was not resented and might
even be rather liked. Perhaps you then wanted to reply “In that case I
should not call it Pain”, and you may have been right. But the truth is
that the word Pain has two senses which must now be distinguished. A. A
particular kind of sensation, probably conveyed by specialised nerve
fibres, and recognisable by the patient as that kind of sensation whether
he dislikes it or not (_e.g._, the faint ache in my limbs would be
recognised as an ache even if I didn’t object to it). B. Any experience,
whether physical or mental, which the patient dislikes. It will be
noticed that all Pains in sense A become Pains in sense B if they are
raised above a certain very low level of intensity, but that Pains in the
B sense need not be Pains in the A sense. Pain in the B sense, in fact,
is synonymous with “suffering”, “anguish”, “tribulation”, “adversity”, or
“trouble”, and it is about it that the problem of pain arises. For the
rest of this book Pain will be used in the B sense and will include all
types of suffering: with the A sense we have no further concern.

Now the proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its
Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that
relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature.
When it does so, it is good and happy. Lest we should think this a
hardship, this kind of good begins on a level far above the creatures,
for God Himself, as Son, from all eternity renders back to God as Father
by filial obedience the being which the Father by paternal love eternally
generates in the Son. This is the pattern which man was made to
imitate—which Paradisal man did imitate—and wherever the will conferred
by the Creator is thus perfectly offered back in delighted and delighting
obedience by the creature, there, most undoubtedly, is Heaven, and there
the Holy Ghost proceeds. In the world as we now know it, the problem is
how to recover this self-surrender. We are not merely imperfect creatures
who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down
our arms. The first answer, then, to the question why our cure should be
painful, is that to render back the will which we have so long claimed
for our own, is in itself, wherever and however it is done, a grievous
pain. Even in Paradise I have supposed a minimal self-adherence to be
overcome, though the overcoming, and the yielding, would there be
rapturous. But to surrender a self-will inflamed and swollen with years
of usurpation is a kind of death. We all remember this self-will as it
was in childhood the bitter, prolonged rage at every thwarting, the burst
of passionate tears, the black, Satanic wish to kill or die rather than
to give in. Hence the older type of nurse or parent was quite right in
thinking that the first step in education is “to break the child’s will”.
Their methods were often wrong: but not to see the necessity is, I think,
to cut oneself off from all understanding of spiritual laws. And if, now
that we are grown up, we do not howl and stamp quite so much, that is
partly because our elders began the process of breaking or killing our
self-will in the nursery, and partly because the same passions now take
more subtle forms and have grown clever at avoiding death by various
“compensations”. Hence the necessity to die daily: however often we think
we have broken the rebellious self we shall still find it alive. That
this process cannot be without pain is sufficiently witnessed by the very
history of the word “Mortification”.

But this intrinsic pain, or death, in mortifying the usurped self, is not
the whole story. Paradoxically, mortification, though itself a pain, is
made easier by the presence of pain in its context. This happens, I
think, principally in three ways.

The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as
long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this
property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their
existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil;
every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt. The
Masochist is no real exception. Sadism and Masochism respectively
isolate, and then exaggerate, a “moment” or “aspect” in normal sexual
passion. Sadism[40] exaggerates the aspect of capture and domination to a
point at which only ill-treatment of the beloved will satisfy the
pervert—as though he said, “I am so much master that I even torment you.”
Masochism exaggerates the complementary and opposite aspect, and says “I
am so enthralled that I welcome even pain at your hands”. Unless the pain
were felt as evil—as an outrage underlining the complete mastery of the
other party—it would cease, for the Masochist, to be an erotic stimulus.
And pain is not only immediately recognisable evil, but evil impossible
to ignore. We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities;
and anyone who has watched gluttons shovelling down the most exquisite
foods as if they did not know what they were eating, will admit that we
can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God
whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in
our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. A bad man, happy,
is a man without the least inkling that his actions do not “answer”, that
they are not in accord with the laws of the universe.

A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human
feeling that bad men ought to suffer. It is no use turning up our noses
at this feeling, as if it were wholly base. On its mildest level it
appeals to everyone’s sense of justice. Once when my brother and I, as
very small boys, were drawing pictures at the same table, I jerked his
elbow and caused him to make an irrelevant line across the middle of his
work; the matter was amicably settled by my allowing him to draw a line
of equal length across mine. That is, I was “put in his place”, made to
see my negligence from the other end. On a sterner level the same idea
appears as “retributive punishment”, or “giving a man what he deserves”.
Some enlightened people would like to banish all conceptions of
retribution or desert from their theory of punishment and place its value
wholly in the deterrence of others or the reform of the criminal himself.
They do not see that by so doing they render all punishment unjust. What
can be more immoral than to inflict suffering on me for the sake of
deterring others if I do not _deserve_ it? And if I do deserve it, you
are admitting the claims of “retribution”. And what can be more
outrageous than to catch me and submit me to a disagreeable process of
moral improvement without my consent, unless (once more) I _deserve_ it?
On yet a third level we get vindictive passion—the thirst for revenge.
This, of course, is evil and expressly forbidden to Christians. But it
has perhaps appeared already from our discussion of Sadism and Masochism
that the ugliest things in human nature are perversions of good or
innocent things. The good thing of which vindictive passion is the
perversion comes out with startling clarity in Hobbes’s definition of
Revengefulness; “desire by doing hurt to another to make him condemn some
fact of his own”.[41] Revenge loses sight of the end in the means, but
its end is not wholly bad—it wants the evil of the bad man to be to him
what it is to everyone else. This is proved by the fact that the avenger
wants the guilty party not merely to suffer, but to suffer at his hands,
and to know it, and to know why. Hence the impulse to taunt the guilty
man with his crime at the moment of taking vengeance: hence, too, such
natural expressions as “I wonder how he’d like it if the same thing were
done to him” or “I’ll teach him”. For the same reason when we are going
to abuse a man in words we say we are going to “let him know what we
think of him”.

When our ancestors referred to pains and sorrows as God’s “vengeance”
upon sin they were not necessarily attributing evil passions to God; they
may have been recognising the good element in the idea of retribution.
Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in
the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. Once pain has roused him,
he knows that he is in some way or other “up against” the real universe:
he either rebels (with the possibility of a clearer issue and deeper
repentance at some later stage) or else makes some attempt at an
adjustment, which, if pursued, will lead him to religion. It is true that
neither effect is so certain now as it was in ages when the existence of
God (or even of the Gods) was more widely known, but even in our own days
we see it operating. Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and
Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on
their view, exist: and other atheists, like Mr. Huxley, are driven by
suffering to raise the whole problem of existence and to find some way of
coming to terms with it which, if not Christian, is almost infinitely
superior to fatuous contentment with a profane life. No doubt Pain as
God’s megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and
unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can
have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth
within the fortress of a rebel soul.

If the first and lowest operation of pain shatters the illusion that all
is well, the second shatters the illusion that what we have, whether good
or bad in itself, is our own and enough for us. Everyone has noticed how
hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with
us. We “have all we want” is a terrible saying when “all” does not
include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere
“God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are
full—there’s nowhere for Him to put it.” Or as a friend of mine said “we
regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies
but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.” Now God, who has made us, knows
what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. Yet we will not seek it
in Him as long as He leaves us any other resort where it can even
plausibly be looked for. While what we call “our own life” remains
agreeable we will not surrender it to Him. What then can God do in our
interests but make “our own life” less agreeable to us, and take away the
plausible sources of false happiness? It is just here, where God’s
providence seems at first to be most cruel, that the Divine humility, the
stooping down of the Highest, most deserves praise. We are perplexed to
see misfortune falling upon decent, inoffensive, worthy people—on
capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty, little
trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for
their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the
enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient
tenderness what here needs to be said? It does not matter that I know I
must become, in the eyes of every hostile reader, as it were personally
responsible for all the sufferings I try to explain—just as, to this day,
everyone talks as if St. Augustine _wanted_ unbaptised infants to go to
Hell. But it matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth. Let
me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for the moment, that
God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks
that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not
enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the
end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched.
And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an
insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to
themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of
their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. I call this 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. The same humility is shown by all those Divine
appeals to our fears which trouble high-minded readers of scripture. It
is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose Him as an
alternative to Hell: yet even this He accepts. The creature’s illusion of
self-sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered; and by
trouble or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames,
God shatters it “unmindful of His glory’s diminution”. Those who would
like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what
they ask. If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to
Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? And this
illusion of self-sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest,
kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune
must fall.

The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the
vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the
vices that lead to worldly success. Prostitutes are in no danger of
finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God:
the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger.

The third operation of suffering is a little harder to grasp. Everyone
will admit that choice is essentially conscious; to choose involves
knowing that you choose. Now Paradisal man always chose to follow God’s
will. In following it he also gratified his own desire, both because all
the actions demanded of him were, in fact, agreeable to his blameless
inclination, and also because the service of God was itself his keenest
pleasure, without which as their razor edge all joys would have been
insipid to him. The question “Am I doing this for God’s sake or only
because I happen to like it?” did not then arise, since doing things for
God’s sake was what he chiefly “happened to like”. His God-ward will rode
his happiness like a well-managed horse, whereas our will, when we are
happy, is carried away in the happiness as in a ship racing down a swift
stream. Pleasure was then an acceptable offering to God because offering
was a pleasure. But we inherit a whole system of desires which do not
necessarily contradict God’s will but which, after centuries of usurped
autonomy, steadfastly ignore it. If the thing we like doing is, in fact,
the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it
remains a mere happy coincidence. We cannot therefore know that we are
acting at all, or primarily, for God’s sake, unless the material of the
action is contrary to our inclinations, or (in other words) painful, and
what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full
acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this
action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the
absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. How impossible it is to enact
the surrender of the self by doing what we like, I know very well from my
own experience at the moment. When I undertook to write this book I hoped
that the will to obey what might be a “leading” had at least some place
in my motives. But now that I am thoroughly immersed in it, it has become
a temptation rather than a duty. I may still hope that the writing of the
book is, in fact, in conformity with God’s will: but to contend that I am
learning to surrender myself by doing what is so attractive to me would
be ridiculous.

Here we tread on very difficult ground. Kant thought that no action had
moral value unless it were done out of pure reverence for the moral law,
that is, without inclination, and he has been accused of a “morbid frame
of mind” which measures the value of an act by its unpleasantness. All
popular opinion is, indeed, on Kant’s side. The people never admire a man
for doing something he likes: the very words “But he _likes_ it” imply
the corollary “And therefore it has no merit”. Yet against Kant stands
the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man
becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions. What an atheist ought to do
about this conflict between the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtue,
I do not know: but as a Christian I suggest the following solution.

It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because
they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands
them. With Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson, I emphatically embrace the
first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion
(reached, I think, by Paley) that charity is good only because God
arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to
hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I
believe, on the contrary, that “they err who think that of the will of
God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will”.[42] God’s
will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness
which always embraces, the intrinsically good. But when we have said that
God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of
the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely
surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our
obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something
intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible
supposition) God had not commanded it. But in addition to the content,
the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational
creature consciously enacts its creaturely _rôle_, reverses the act by
which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns.

We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may
well be agreeable, and that the better a man is the more he will like it;
but we agree with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that
of self surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen
creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right
act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme cancelling of
Adam’s fall, the movement “full speed astern” by which we retrace our
long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard knot, must be
when the creature, with no desire to aid it, stripped naked to the bare
willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does
that for which only one motive is possible. Such an act may be described
as a “test” of the creature’s return to God: hence our fathers said that
troubles were “sent to try us”. A familiar example is Abraham’s “trial”
when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the
morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious
question “If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do,
without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture?” But as St.
Augustine points out,[43] whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not
know that his obedience could endure such a command until the event
taught him: and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose,
he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was
the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham “would obey”
was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment. To
say that God “need not have tried the experiment” is to say that because
God knows, the thing known by God need not exist.

If pain sometimes shatters the creature’s false self-sufficiency, yet in
supreme “Trial” or “Sacrifice” it teaches him the self-sufficiency which
really ought to be his—the “strength, which, if Heaven gave it, may be
called his own”: for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives
and supports, he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers
upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative
and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many
senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts
our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other
than the self—through the desires which our physical organism and our
heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone—that is, from God
_in_ ourselves—we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation:
and that is why such an act undoes with “backward mutters of dissevering
power” the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. Hence as
suicide is the typical expression of the stoic spirit, and battle of the
warrior spirit, martyrdom always remains the supreme enacting and
perfection of Christianity. This great action has been initiated for us,
done on our behalf, exemplified for our imitation, and inconceivably
communicated to all believers, by Christ on Calvary. There the degree of
accepted Death reaches the utmost bounds of the imaginable and perhaps
goes beyond them; not only all natural supports, but the presence of the
very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim, and
surrender to God does not falter though God “forsakes” it.

The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity.
Nature herself has written it large across the world in the repeated
drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn. From nature, perhaps,
the oldest agricultural communities learned it and with animal, or human,
sacrifices showed forth for centuries the truth that “without shedding of
blood is no remission”[44]; and though at first such conceptions may have
concerned only the crops and offspring of the tribe they came later, in
the Mysteries, to concern the spiritual death and resurrection of the
individual. The Indian ascetic, mortifying his body on a bed of spikes,
preaches the same lesson; the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of
wisdom is “a practice of death”.[45] The sensitive and noble heathen of
modern times makes his imagined gods “die into life”.[46] Mr. Huxley
expounds “non-attachment”. We cannot escape the doctrine by ceasing to be
Christians. It is an “eternal gospel” revealed to men wherever men have
sought, or endured, the truth: it is the very nerve of redemption, which
anatomising wisdom at all times and in all places lays bare; the
unescapable knowledge which the Light that lighteneth every man presses
down upon the minds of all who seriously question what the universe is
“about”. The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this
doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity
teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been
accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to
trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a “copy”,
not an original. Again, where other systems expose our total nature to
death (as in Buddhist renunciation) Christianity demands only that we set
right a _misdirection_ of our nature, and has no quarrel, like Plato,
with the body as such, nor with the psychical elements in our make-up.
And sacrifice in its supreme realisation is not exacted of all.
Confessors as well as martyrs are saved, and some old people whose state
of grace we can hardly doubt seem to have got through their seventy years
surprisingly easily. The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed,
among His followers in very varying degrees, from the cruellest martyrdom
down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing
to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and “sweet
reasonableness”. The causes of this distribution I do not know; but from
our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is
not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do
_not_. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation
of those who are fortunate in this world only by referring to the
unsearchable omnipotence of God.[47]

All arguments in justification of suffering provoke bitter resentment
against the author. You would like to know how I behave when I am
experiencing pain, not writing books about it. You need not guess, for I
will tell you; I am a great coward. But what is that to the purpose? When
I think of pain—of anxiety that gnaws like fire and loneliness that
spreads out like a desert, and the heartbreaking 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”. If I knew any way of escape I would crawl through sewers to find
it. But what is the good of telling you about my feelings? You know them
already: they are the same as yours. I am not arguing that pain is not
painful. Pain hurts. That is what the word means. I am only trying to
show that the old Christian doctrine of being made “perfect through
suffering”[48] is not incredible. To prove it palatable is beyond my
design.

In estimating the credibility of the doctrine two principles ought to be
observed. In the first place we must remember that the actual moment of
present pain is only the centre of what may be called the whole
tribulational system which extends itself by fear and pity. Whatever good
effects these experiences have are dependent upon the centre; so that
even if pain itself was of no spiritual value, yet, if fear and pity
were, pain would have to exist in order that there should be something to
be feared and pitied. And that fear and pity help us in our return to
obedience and charity is not to be doubted. Everyone has experienced the
effect of pity in making it easier for us to love the unlovely—that is,
to love men not because they are in any way naturally agreeable to us but
because they are our brethren. The beneficence of fear most of us have
learned during the period of “crises” that led up to the present war. My
own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of
life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in
a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that
tickles my vanity to-day, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab
of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the
newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack
of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little
happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by
bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at
all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to
possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real
treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day
or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its
strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn,
my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive
me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the
threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days.
Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had
me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything
else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I
behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as
I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the
nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why
tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that
our remaking is now hopeless.

In the second place, when we are considering pain itself—the centre of
the whole tribulational system—we must be careful to attend to what we
know and not to what we imagine. That is one of the reasons why the whole
central part of this book is devoted to human pain, and animal pain is
relegated to a special chapter. About human pain we know, about animal
pain we only speculate. But even within the human race we must draw our
evidence from instances that have come under our own observation. The
tendency of this or that novelist or poet may represent suffering as
wholly bad in its effects, as producing, and justifying, every kind of
malice and brutality in the sufferer. And, of course, pain, like
pleasure, can be so received: all that is given to a creature with free
will must be two-edged, not by the nature of the giver or of the gift,
but by the nature of the recipient.[49] And, again, the evil results of
pain can be multiplied if sufferers are persistently taught by the
bystanders that such results are the proper and manly results for them to
exhibit. Indignation at other’s sufferings, though a generous passion,
needs to be well managed lest it steal away patience and humility from
those who suffer and plant anger and cynicism in their stead. But I am
not convinced that suffering, if spared such officious vicarious
indignation, has any natural tendency to produce such evils. I did not
find the front-line trenches or the C.C.S. more full than any other place
of hatred, selfishness, rebellion, and dishonesty. I have seen great
beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for
the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have
seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from
most unpromising subjects. I see in loved and revered historical figures,
such as Johnson and Cowper, traits which might scarcely have been
tolerable if the men had been happier. If the world is indeed a “vale of
soul making” it seems on the whole to be doing its work. Of poverty—the
affliction which actually or potentially includes all other afflictions—I
would not dare to speak as from myself; and those who reject Christianity
will not be moved by Christ’s statement that poverty is blessed. But here
a rather remarkable fact comes to my aid. Those who would most scornfully
repudiate Christianity as a mere “opiate of the people” have a contempt
for the rich, that is, for all mankind _except_ the poor. They regard the
poor as the only people worth preserving from “liquidation”, and place in
them the only hope of the human race. But this is not compatible with a
belief that the effects of poverty on those who suffer it are wholly
evil; it even implies that they are good. The Marxist thus finds himself
in real agreement with the Christian in those two beliefs which
Christianity paradoxically demands—that poverty is blessed and yet ought
to be removed.




 VII. HUMAN PAIN, continued


All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto _this second
law eternal_; and even those things which to this eternal law are not
conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by _the first
eternal law_.
                              Hooker. _Laws of Eccles. Pol._, I, iii, 1.

In this chapter I advance six propositions necessary to complete our
account of human suffering which do not arise out of one another and must
therefore be given in an arbitrary order.

1. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the
poor, but by “judgement” (_i.e._, social justice) and alms we are to
remove poverty wherever possible. Blessed are we when persecuted, but we
may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be
spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. But if suffering is good,
ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering
is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the
sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the
compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. In the fallen
and partially redeemed universe we may distinguish (1) The simple good
descending from God, (2) The simple evil produced by rebellious
creatures, and (3) the exploitation of that evil by God for His
redemptive purpose, which produces (4) the complex good to which accepted
suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make
complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may
save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central.
Offences must come, but woe to those by whom they come; sins _do_ cause
grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to
sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all
historical events, but the _rôle_ of Judas remains simply evil. We may
apply this first to the problem of other people’s suffering. A merciful
man aims at his neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will”, consciously
co-operating with “the simple good”. A cruel man oppresses his neighbour,
and so does simple evil. But in doing such evil, he is used by God,
without his own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that
the first man serves God as a son, and the second as a tool. For you will
certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a
difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole
system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good men and bad
men, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for
which the cruel man is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good
man ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because
a man is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) his
fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be
attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when he who inflicts
the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived
from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a
surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a
general charter for afflicting humanity “because affliction is good for
them” (as Marlowe’s lunatic Tamberlaine boasted himself the “scourge of
God”) is not indeed to break the divine scheme but to volunteer for the
post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must be
prepared for his wages.

The problem about avoiding our own pain admits a similar solution. Some
ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the
prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits,
self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God.
Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your
dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against
the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride:
involuntary hunger subjects appetites and will together to the Divine
will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger
of rebellion. But the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its
tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves
strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to
put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering
the whole man to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they
would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there
stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical
self. It was, therefore, truly said that “only God can mortify”.
Tribulation does its work in a world where human beings are ordinarily
seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain
their natural good, and presupposes such a world. In order to submit the
will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects.
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy”, but a readiness to
prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the
Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape
suffering and death if such escape were compatible with the Father’s
will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not.
Some of the saints recommend a “total renunciation” at the very threshold
of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for
every particular renunciation[50] that may be demanded, for it would not
be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission
to God as such. What would be the _material_ for the submission? It would
seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to
God’s will”, for the second _what_ has no content. Doubtless we all spend
too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated
intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with
“nature”—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for
which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated.

It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of
suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to
leave the world, even in a temporal sense, “better” than we found it. In
the fullest parabolic picture which He gave of the Judgement, Our Lord
seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be
misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a
whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the
social ethics of Christianity.

2. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must
anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either
redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe
any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic,
political, or hygienic system were made, a heaven on earth would follow.
This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but
it is not found in practice to discourage him. On the contrary, a strong
sense of our common miseries, simply as men, is at least as good a spur
to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes
which tempt men to seek their realisation by breaking the moral law and
prove such dust and ashes when they are realised. If applied to
individual life, the doctrine that an imagined heaven on earth is
necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once
reveal its absurdity. Hungry men seek food and sick men healing none the
less because they know that after the meal or the cure the ordinary ups
and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing
whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not,
desirable; I am only reminding the reader that a particular medicine is
not to be mistaken for the elixir of life.

3. Since political issues have here crossed our path, I must make it
clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a
purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms
of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to
say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creature owes to its
Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is
unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition
whatsoever.

4. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very
curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and
security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of
the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast.
We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not
hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts
in this world and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments
of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends,
a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes
us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to
mistake them for home.

5. We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk
about the “unimaginable sum of human misery”. Suppose that I have a
toothache of intensity _x_: and suppose that you, who are seated beside
me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity _x_. You may, if you
choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2_x_. But
you must remember that no one is suffering 2_x_: search all time and all
space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s
consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one
suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can
suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have
reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition
of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

6. Of all evils, pain only is sterilised or disinfected evil.
Intellectual evil, or error, may recur because the cause of the first
error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate: but
quite apart from that, error in its own right breeds error—if the first
step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. Sin
may recur because the original temptation continues; but quite apart from
that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and
weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course
recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still
operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate.
When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This
distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not
only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to
correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible,
remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself.
In each case an “undoing” is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You
may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over, is
sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own
right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of
time. Again, when I err, my error infects every one who believes me. When
I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my
guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to his charity and humility.
But suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are
unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—pity. Thus that evil
which God chiefly uses to produce the “complex good” is most markedly
disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst
characteristic of evil in general.




 VIII. HELL


  What is the world, O soldiers?
    It is I:
  I, this incessant snow,
    This northern sky;
  Soldiers, this solitude
    Through which we go
      Is I.
                                              W. de la Mare. _Napoleon._

  Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
                                                            Shakespeare.

In an earlier chapter it was admitted that the pain which alone could
rouse the bad man to a knowledge that all was not well, might also lead
to a final and unrepented rebellion. And it has been admitted throughout
that man has free will and that all gifts to him are therefore two edged.
From these premises it follows directly that the Divine labour to redeem
the world cannot be certain of succeeding as regards every individual
soul. Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more
willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But
it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own
words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of
reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the
happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that
surrender but himself (though many can help him to make it) and he may
refuse. I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully “All will be
saved”. But my reason retorts, “Without their will, or with it?” If I say
“Without their will” I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the
supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say “With
their will”, my reason replies “How if they _will not_ give in?”

The Dominical utterances about Hell, like all Dominical sayings, are
addressed to the conscience and the will, not to our intellectual
curiosity. When they have roused us into action by convincing us of a
terrible possibility, they have done, probably, all they were intended to
do; and if all the world were convinced Christians it would be
unnecessary to say a word more on the subject. As things are, however,
this doctrine is one of the chief grounds on which Christianity is
attacked as barbarous, and the goodness of God impugned. We are told that
it is a detestable doctrine—and indeed, I too detest it from the bottom
of my heart—and are reminded of the tragedies in human life which have
come from believing it. Of the other tragedies which come from not
believing it we are told less. For these reasons, and these alone, it
becomes necessary to discuss the matter.

The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His
creatures to final ruin. That would be the problem if we were Mahometans.
Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us
with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy that He
becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His
creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling,
or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. I said glibly
a moment ago that I would pay “any price” to remove this _doctrine_. I
lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has
already paid to remove the _fact_. And here is the real problem: so much
mercy, yet still there is Hell.

I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no
mistake; it is _not_ tolerable. But I think the doctrine can be shown to
be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt,
against it.

First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive
punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with in a previous
chapter. It was there maintained that all punishment became unjust if the
ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it; and a core of
righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion itself, in the
demand that the evil man must not be left perfectly satisfied with his
own evil, that it must be made to appear to him what it rightly appears
to others—evil. I said that Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel
fortress. We were then discussing pain which might still lead to
repentance. How if it does not—if no further conquest than the planting
of the flag ever takes place? Let us try to be honest with ourselves.
Picture to yourself a man who has risen to wealth or power by a continued
course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends
the noble motions of his victims, laughing the while at their simplicity;
who, having thus attained success, uses it for the gratification of lust
and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by
betraying his own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of
bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that he does all this, not
(as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but
eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant—a jolly,
ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to
the very end that he alone has found the answer to the riddle of life,
that God and man are fools whom he has got the better of, that his way of
life is utterly successful, satisfactory, unassailable. We must be
careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is
very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for
the conversion of such a man: to prefer his conversion, at the peril of
our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to his punishment; to prefer it
infinitely. But that is not the question. Supposing he _will_ not be
converted, what destiny in the eternal world can you regard as proper for
him? Can you really desire that such a man, _remaining what he is_ (and
he must be able to do that if he has free will) should be confirmed
forever in his present happiness—should continue, for all eternity, to be
perfectly convinced that the laugh is on his side? And if you cannot
regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness—only spite—that
prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between Justice
and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of
theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as
if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved not by a
desire for the wretched creature’s pain as such, but by a truly ethical
demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted
in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest
is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if
it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake.
Even mercy can hardly wish to such a man his eternal, contented
continuance in such ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said of suffering,
as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself,
but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular
circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of
the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the
alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant
that the evil is contrary to its nature, “either of which”, says the
philosopher, “is _manifestly_ bad”.[51] And I think, though we tremble,
we agree.

The demand that God should forgive such a man while he remains what he
is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone
an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. But
forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered if it is to be
complete: and a man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

I have begun with the conception of Hell as a positive retributive
punishment inflicted by God because that is the form in which the
doctrine is most repellent, and I wished to tackle the strongest
objection. But, of course, though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a
sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the
judgement consists in the very fact that men prefer darkness to light,
and that not He, but His “word”, judges men.[52] We are therefore at
liberty—since the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same
thing—to think of this bad man’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on
him but as the mere fact of being what he is. The characteristic of lost
souls is “their rejection of everything that is not simply
themselves”.[53] Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything he
meets into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the
_other_, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him
except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary
contact with an outer world. Death removes this last contact. He has his
wish—to live wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds
there. And what he finds there is Hell.

Another objection turns on the apparent disproportion between eternal
damnation and transitory sin. And if we think of eternity as a mere
prolongation of time, it is disproportionate. But many would reject this
idea of eternity. If we think of time as a line—which is a good image,
because the parts of time are successive and no two of them can co-exist;
_i.e._, there is no _width_ in time, only length—we probably ought to
think of eternity as a plane or even a solid. Thus the whole reality of a
human being would be represented by a solid figure. That solid would be
mainly the work of God, acting through grace and nature, but human free
will would have contributed the base-line which we call earthly life; and
if you draw your base line askew, the whole solid will be in the wrong
place. The fact that life is short, or, in the symbol, that we contribute
only one little line to the whole complex figure, might be regarded as a
Divine mercy. For if even the drawing of that little line, left to our
free will, is sometimes so badly done as to spoil the whole, how much
worse a mess might we have made of the figure if more had been entrusted
to us? A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death
ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance.[54] I
believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be
given. But a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is
really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality
must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to
believe that omniscience knows when.

A third objection turns on the frightful intensity of the pains of Hell
as suggested by mediæval art and, indeed, by certain passages in
Scripture. Von Hügel here warns us not to confuse the doctrine itself
with the _imagery_ by which it may be conveyed. Our Lord speaks of Hell
under three symbols: first, that of punishment (“everlasting punishment,”
Matt. xxv, 46); second, that of destruction (“fear Him who is able to
destroy both body and soul in Hell,” Matt. x, 28); and thirdly, that of
privation, exclusion, or banishment into “the darkness outside”, as in
the parables of the man without a wedding garment or of the wise and
foolish virgins. The prevalent image of fire is significant because it
combines the ideas of torment and destruction. Now it is quite certain
that all these expressions are intended to suggest something unspeakably
horrible, and any interpretation which does not face that fact is, I am
afraid, out of court from the beginning. But it is not necessary to
concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting
destruction and privation. What can that be whereof all three images are
equally proper symbols? Destruction, we should naturally assume, means
the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if
the “annihilation” of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our
experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of
something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash. To _have
been_ a log means now being those three things. If soul can be destroyed,
must there not be a state of _having been_ a human soul? And is not that,
perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment,
destruction, and privation? You will remember that in the parable, the
saved go to a place prepared for _them_, while the damned go to a place
never made for men at all.[55] To enter heaven is to become more human
than you ever succeeded in being in earth; to enter hell, is to be
banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a
man: it is “remains”. To be a complete man means to have the passions
obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to _have been_ a man—to
be an ex-man or “damned ghost”—would presumably mean to consist of a will
utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the
will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of
such a creature—already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins
rather than a sinner—would be like. There may be a truth in the saying
that “hell is hell, not from its own point of view, but from the heavenly
point of view”. I do not think this belies the severity of Our Lord’s
words. It is only to the damned that their fate could ever seem less than
unendurable. And it must be admitted that as, in these last chapters, we
think of eternity, the categories of pain and pleasure, which have
engaged us so long, begin to recede, as vaster good and evil looms in
sight. Neither pain nor pleasure as such has the last word. Even if it
were possible that the experience (if it can be called experience) of the
lost contained no pain and much pleasure, still, that black pleasure
would be such as to send any soul, not already damned, flying to its
prayers in nightmare terror: even if there were pains in heaven, all who
understand would desire them.

A fourth objection is that no charitable man could himself be blessed in
heaven while he knew that even one human soul was still in hell; and if
so, are we more merciful than God? At the back of this objection lies a
mental picture of heaven and hell co-existing in unilinear time as the
histories of England and America co-exist: so that at each moment the
blessed could say “The miseries of hell are _now_ going on”. But I notice
that Our Lord, while stressing the terror of hell with unsparing severity
usually emphasises the idea not of duration but of _finality_.
Consignment to the destroying fire is usually treated as the end of the
story—not as the beginning of a new story. That the lost soul is
eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether
this eternal fixity implies endless duration—or duration at all—we cannot
say. Dr. Edwyn Bevan has some interesting speculations on this point.[56]
 We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of
humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human
life: but hell was not made for men. It is in no sense _parallel_ to
heaven: it is “the darkness outside”, the outer rim where being fades
away into nonentity.

Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the
defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will,
omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat.
What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not
Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its
own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats
we attribute to the Deity. I willingly believe that the damned are, in
one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are
locked on the _inside_. I do not mean that the ghosts may not _wish_ to
come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to
be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary
stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach
any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and
are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to
obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.

In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of
hell, is itself a question: “What are you asking God to do?” To wipe out
their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing
every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so,
on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them
alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

One caution, and I have done. In order to rouse modern minds to an
understanding of the issues, I ventured to introduce in this chapter a
picture of the sort of bad man whom we most easily perceive to be truly
bad. But when the picture has done that work, the sooner it is forgotten
the better. In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our
eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since
both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. This chapter is not
about your wife or son, nor about Nero or Judas Iscariot; it is about you
and me.




IX. ANIMAL PAIN


And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name
thereof.
                                                         Genesis ii, 19.

To find out what is natural, we must study specimens which retain their
nature and not those which have been corrupted.
                                         Aristotle. _Politics_, I, v, 5.

Thus far of human suffering; but all this time “a plaint of guiltless
hurt doth pierce the sky”. The problem of animal suffering is appalling;
not because the animals are so numerous (for, as we have seen, no more
pain is felt when a million suffer than when one suffers) but because the
Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. So
far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore
they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it. At the same time we
must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the centre of
the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes
plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important
indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge. God has
given us data which enable us, in some degree, to understand our own
suffering: He has given us no such data about beasts. We know neither why
they were made nor what they are, and everything we say about them is
speculative. From the doctrine that God is good we may confidently deduce
that the _appearance_ of reckless divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is
an illusion—and the fact that the only suffering we know at first hand
(our own) turns out not to be a cruelty will make it easier to believe
this. After that, everything is guesswork.

We may begin by ruling out some of the pessimistic bluff put up in the
first chapter. The fact that vegetable lives “prey upon” one another and
are in a state of “ruthless” competition is of no moral importance at
all. “Life” in the biological sense has nothing to do with good and evil
until sentience appears. The very words “prey” and “ruthless” are mere
metaphors. Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air it
breathes”, but there is no reason to suppose he was right. No doubt,
living plants react to injuries differently from inorganic matter; but an
anæsthetised human body reacts more differently still and such reactions
do not prove sentience. We are, of course, justified in speaking of the
death or thwarting of a plant as if it were a tragedy, provided that we
know we are using a metaphor. To furnish symbols for spiritual
experiences may be one of the functions of the mineral and vegetable
worlds. But we must not become the victims of our metaphor. A forest in
which half the trees are killing the other half may be a perfectly “good”
forest: for its goodness consists in its utility and beauty and it does
not feel.

When we turn to the beasts, three questions arise. There is, first, the
question of fact; what do animals suffer? There is, secondly, the
question of origin; how did disease and pain enter the animal world? And,
thirdly, there is the question of justice; how can animal suffering be
reconciled with the justice of God?

1. In the long run the answer to the first question is, We don’t know;
but some speculations may be worth setting down. We must begin by
distinguishing among animals: for if the ape could understand us he would
take it very ill to be lumped along with the oyster and the earth-worm in
a single class of “animals” and contrasted to men. Clearly in some ways
the ape and man are much more like each other than either is like the
worm. At the lower end of the animal realm we need not assume anything we
could recognise as sentience. Biologists in distinguishing animal from
vegetable do not make use of sentience or locomotion or other such
characteristics as a layman would naturally fix upon. At some point,
however (though where, we cannot say), sentience almost certainly comes
in, for the higher animals have nervous systems very like our own. But at
this level we must still distinguish sentience from consciousness. If you
happen never to have heard of this distinction before, I am afraid you
will find it rather startling, but it has great authority and you would
be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand. Suppose that three sensations
follow one another—first A, then B, then C. When this happens to you, you
have the experience of passing through the process ABC. But note what
this implies. It implies that there is something in you which stands
sufficiently outside A to notice A passing away, and sufficiently outside
B to notice B now beginning and coming to fill the place which A has
vacated; and something which recognises itself as the same through the
transition from A to B and B to C, so that it can say “I have had the
experience ABC.” Now this something is what I call Consciousness or Soul
and the process I have just described is one of the proofs that the soul,
though experiencing time, is not itself completely “timeful”. The
simplest experience of ABC as a succession demands a soul which is not
itself a mere succession of states, but rather a permanent bed along
which these different portions of the stream of sensation roll, and which
recognises itself as the same beneath them all. Now it is almost certain
that the nervous system of one of the higher animals presents it with
successive sensations. It does not follow that it has any “soul”,
anything which recognises itself as having had A, and now having B, and
now marking how B glides away to make room for C. If it had no such
“soul”, what we call the experience ABC would never occur. There would,
in philosophic language, be “a succession of perceptions”; that is, the
sensations would, in fact, occur in that order, and God would know that
they were so occurring, but the animal would not know. There would not be
“a perception of succession”. This would mean that if you give such a
creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there
is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that “I have had two pains”.
Even in the single pain, there is no self to say “I am in pain”—for if it
could distinguish itself from the sensation—the bed from the
stream—sufficiently to say “I am in pain” it would also be able to
connect the two sensations as _its_ experience. The correct description
would be “Pain is taking place in this animal”; not, as we commonly say,
“This animal feels pain”, for the words “this” and “feels” really smuggle
in the assumption that it is a “self” or “soul” or “consciousness”
standing above the sensations and organising them into an “experience” as
we do. Such sentience without consciousness, I admit, we cannot imagine:
not because it never occurs in us, but because, when it does, we describe
ourselves as being “unconscious”. And rightly. The fact that animals
react to pain much as we do is, of course, no proof that they are
conscious; for we may also so react under chloroform, and even answer
questions while asleep.

How far up the scale such unconscious sentience may extend, I will not
even guess. It is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the
elephant, and the higher domestic animals, have not, in some degree, a
self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary
individuality. But at least a great deal of what appears to be animal
suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have
invented the “sufferers” by the “pathetic fallacy” of reading into the
beast a self for which there is no real evidence.

2. The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier
generations, to the Fall of man—the whole world was infected by the
uncreating rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good
reason to believe that animals existed long before men. Carnivorousness,
with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at
this point not to remember a certain sacred story which, though never
included in the creeds, has been widely believed in the Church and seems
to be implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannine utterances—I
mean the story that man was not the first creature to rebel against the
Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since became
apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord
of this world. Some people would like to reject all such elements from
Our Lord’s teaching: and it might be argued that when He emptied Himself
of His glory He also humbled Himself to share, as man, the current
superstitions of His time. And I certainly think that Christ, in the
flesh, was not omniscient—if only because a human brain could not,
presumably, be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness, and to say that
Our Lord’s thinking was not really conditioned by the size and shape of
His brain might be to deny the real incarnation and become a Docetist.
Thus, if Our Lord had committed Himself to any scientific or historical
statement which we knew to be untrue, this would not disturb my faith in
His deity. But the doctrine of Satan’s existence and fall is not among
the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discovered
by scientists but the mere, vague “climate of opinion” that we happen to
be living in. Now I take a very low view of “climates of opinion”. In his
own subject every man knows that all discoveries are made and all errors
corrected by those who ignore the “climate of opinion”.

It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty
created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe,
or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever man came
on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him.
This hypothesis is not introduced as a general “explanation of evil”: it
only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the
abuse of free-will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may
well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. The
intrinsic evil of the animal world lies in the fact that animals, or some
animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will
not admit to be an evil. The Satanic corruption of the beasts would
therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of
man. For one result of man’s fall was that his animality fell back from
the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer
rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back
into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the
immense mortality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts
is balanced, in nature, by an immense birth-rate, and it might seem, that
if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve
as a result of their own multiplication. But I take the fecundity and the
death-rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity
for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this world thought
of it as a response to carnivorousness—a double scheme for securing the
maximum amount of torture. If it offends less, you may say that the
“life-force” is corrupted, where I say that living creatures were
corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it
easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of
hypostatised abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much
nearer to literal truth than we suppose. Let us not forget that Our Lord,
on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God’s wrath, nor to
nature, but quite explicitly to Satan.[57]

If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering
whether man, at his first coming into the world, had not already a
redemptive function to perform. Man, even now, can do wonders to animals:
my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have
been one of man’s functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if
he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an
extent now hardly imaginable.

3. Finally, there is the question of justice. We have seen reason to
believe that not all animals suffer as we think they do: but some, at
least, look as if they had selves, and what shall be done for these
innocents? And we have seen that it is possible to believe that animal
pain is not God’s handiwork but begun by Satan’s malice and perpetuated
by man’s desertion of his post: still, if God has not caused it, He has
permitted it, and, once again, what shall be done for these innocents? I
have been warned not even to raise the question of animal immortality,
lest I find myself “in company with all the old maids”.[58] I have no
objection to the company. I do not think either virginity or old age
contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the
bodies of old maids. Nor am I greatly moved by jocular enquiries such as
“Where will you put all the mosquitoes?”—a question to be answered on its
own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to the worst, a heaven
for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined.
The complete silence of Scripture and Christian tradition on animal
immortality is a more serious objection; but it would be fatal only if
Christian revelation showed any signs of being intended as a _système de
la nature_ answering all questions. But it is nothing of the sort: the
curtain has been rent at one point, and at one point only, to reveal our
immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual
curiosity. If animals were, in fact, immortal, it is unlikely, from what
we discern of God’s method in the revelation, that He would have revealed
this truth. Even our own immortality is a doctrine that comes late in the
history of Judaism. The argument from silence is therefore very weak.

The real difficulty about supposing most animals to be immortal is that
immortality has almost no meaning for a creature which is not “conscious”
in the sense explained above. If the life of a newt is merely a
succession of sensations, what should we mean by saying that God may
recall to life the newt that died to-day? It would not recognise itself
as the same newt; the pleasant sensations of any other newt that lived
after its death would be just as much, or just as little, a recompense
for its earthly sufferings (if any) as those of its resurrected—I was
going to say “self”, but the whole point is that the newt probably has no
self. The thing we have to try to say, on this hypothesis, will not even
be said. There is, therefore, I take it, no question of immortality for
creatures that are merely sentient. Nor do justice and mercy demand that
there should be, for such creatures have no painful experience. Their
nervous system delivers all the _letters_ A, P, N, I, but since they
cannot read they never build it up into the word PAIN. And all animals
_may_ be in that condition.

If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though
doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in
those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat
deeper consideration. The error we must avoid is that of considering them
in themselves. Man is to be understood only in his relation to God. The
beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and, through
man, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of
atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers.
Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of man and the other animals
as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the
taming of an animal by a man as a purely arbitrary interference of one
species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild
one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. But a
Christian must not think so. Man was appointed by God to have dominion
over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a
lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by divine
right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only
“natural” animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to
occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine
of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a
real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master. If
a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has
made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in”. I
do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so
that man is _in_ Christ and Christ _in_ God and the Holy Spirit _in_ the
Church and also _in_ the individual believer in exactly the same sense.
They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I
am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set right by
real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not
identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are
_in_ their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by
itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will
raise and bless _that_. You must take the whole context _in_ which the
beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-
ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead”. That whole
context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely
sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with
the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is
necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human
pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which
is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in
this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an
immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters.
And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal
disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you
ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of
the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its
identity always did reside even in the earthly life—in its relation to
the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body”. In
other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and,
in knowing him, will _be_ itself. To ask that it should, in any other
way, _know_ itself, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals
aren’t like that, and don’t want to be.

My picture of the good sheepdog in the good homestead does not, of
course, cover wild animals nor (a matter even more urgent) ill-treated
domestic animals. But it is intended only as an illustration drawn from
one privileged instance—which is, also, on my view the only normal and
unperverted instance—of the general principles to be observed in framing
a theory of animal resurrection. I think Christians may justly hesitate
to suppose any beasts immortal, for two reasons. Firstly, because they
fear, by attributing to beasts a “soul” in the full sense, to obscure
that difference between beast and man which is as sharp in the spiritual
dimension as it is hazy and problematical in the biological. And
secondly, a future happiness connected with the beast’s present life
simply as a compensation for suffering—so many millenniums in the happy
pastures paid down as “damages” for so many years of pulling carts—seems
a clumsy assertion of Divine goodness. We, because we are fallible, often
hurt a child or an animal unintentionally, and then the best we can do is
to “make up for it” by some caress or tit-bit. But it is hardly pious to
imagine omniscience acting in that way—as though God trod on the animals’
tails in the dark and then did the best He could about it! In such a
botched adjustment I cannot recognise the master-touch; whatever the
answer is, it must be something better than that. The theory I am
suggesting tries to avoid both objections. It makes God the centre of the
universe and man the subordinate centre of terrestrial nature: the beasts
are not co-ordinate with man, but subordinate to him, and their destiny
is through and through related to his. And the derivative immortality
suggested for them is not a mere _amende_ or compensation: it is part and
parcel of the new heaven and new earth, organically related to the whole
suffering process of the world’s fall and redemption.

Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely
the gift of man—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as
our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose
that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to a “self” or
_ego_. But if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that
they should live again, their immortality would also be related to
man—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity. That is to
say, if in any instance the quasi-spiritual and emotional value which
human tradition attributes to a beast (such as the “innocence” of the
lamb or the heraldic royalty of the lion) has a real ground in the
beast’s nature, and is not merely arbitrary or accidental, then it is in
_that_ capacity, or principally in that, that the beast may be expected
to attend on risen man and make part of his “train”. Or if the
traditional character is quite erroneous, then the beast’s heavenly
life[59] would be in virtue of the real, but unknown, effect it has
actually had on man during his whole history: for if Christian cosmology
is in _any_ sense (I do not say, in a literal sense) true, then all that
exists on our planet is related to man, and even the creatures that were
extinct before men existed are then only seen in their true light when
they are seen as the unconscious harbingers of man.

When we are speaking of creatures so remote from us as wild beasts, and
prehistoric beasts, we hardly know what we are talking about. It may well
be that they have no selves and no sufferings. It may even be that each
species has a corporate self—that Lionhood, not lions, has shared in the
travail of creation and will enter into the restoration of all things.
And if we cannot imagine even our own eternal life, much less can we
imagine the life the beasts may have as our “members”. If the earthly
lion could read the prophecy of that day when he shall eat hay like an
ox, he would regard it as a description not of heaven, but of hell. And
if there is nothing in the lion but carnivorous sentience, then he is
unconscious and his “survival” would have no meaning. But if there is a
rudimentary Leonine self, to that also God can give a “body” as it
pleases Him—a body no longer living by the destruction of the lamb, yet
richly Leonine in the sense that it also expresses whatever energy and
splendour and exulting power dwelled within the visible lion on this
earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern
hyperbole when he spoke of the lion and the lamb _lying down_ together.
That would be rather impertinent of the lamb. To have lions and lambs
that so consorted (except on some rare celestial Saturnalia of
topsy-turvydom) would be the same as having neither lambs nor lions. I
think the lion, when he has ceased to be dangerous, will still be awful:
indeed, that we shall then first see that of which the present fangs and
claws are a clumsy, and satanically perverted, imitation. There will
still be something like the shaking of a golden mane: and often the good
Duke will say, “Let him roar again”.




X. HEAVEN


 It is required
  You do awake your faith. Then all stand still;
  On; those that think it is unlawful business
  I am about, let them depart.
                                           Shakespeare. _Winter’s Tale._

  Plunged in thy depth of mercy let me die
  The death that every soul that lives desires.
                                           Cowper out of _Madame Guion_.

“I reckon”, said St. Paul, “that the sufferings of this present time are
not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in
us.”[60] If this is so, a book on suffering which says nothing of heaven,
is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. Scripture and
tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the scale against the
sufferings of earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does
not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very shy nowadays of even
mentioning heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky”, and
of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a
happy world here and now into dreams of a happy world elsewhere. But
either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then
Christianity is false, for this doctrine is woven into its whole fabric.
If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it
is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that heaven
is a bribe, and that if we make it our goal we shall no longer be
disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul
can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God,
for only the pure in heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully
motives. A man’s love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to
marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it,
nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and
leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.

You may think that there is another reason for our silence about
heaven—namely, that we do not really desire it. But that may be an
illusion. What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own
without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgement of
better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been times
when I think we do not desire heaven; but more often I find myself
wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything
else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound
together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common
quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:
but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why,
liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some
landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your
life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing
what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you
realise that this landscape means something totally different to him,
that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable
suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there
not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously
ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge
of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the
clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong
friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being
who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that
something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of
other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder
passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are
looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never _had_ it. All
the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints
of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that
died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become
manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled
into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt
you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for”. We cannot tell
each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the
incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met
our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still
desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or
work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.[61]

This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment,
but that only means that heredity and environment are among the
instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering not how, but
why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these
differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one.
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 mansions. For it
is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the
individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate
creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are,
sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter
satisfaction. The Brocken spectre “looked to every man like his first
love”, because she was a cheat. But God will look to every soul like its
first love because He is its first love. Your place in heaven will seem
to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for
it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

It is from this point of view that we can understand Hell in its aspect
of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just
beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will
wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that
it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.

This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of
great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an
experience. You have experienced only the _want_ of it. The thing itself
has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion.
Always it has summoned you out of yourself. And if you will not go out of
yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt
to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you. “The door into life
generally opens behind us” and “the only wisdom” for one “haunted with
the scent of unseen roses, is work.”[62] This secret fire goes out when
you use the bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma
and ethics, turn your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it
will blaze. The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we
the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture
into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. But we have
reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the black-out is not quite
complete. There are chinks. At times the daily scene looks big with its
secret.

Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret desire
also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the end. But
this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The desire—much more
the satisfaction—has always refused to be fully present in any
experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it
but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or
transformation could go beyond what the desire itself leads us to
anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true, something better is. But
“something better”—not this or that experience, but beyond it—is almost
the definition of the thing I am trying to describe.

The thing you long for summons you away from the self. Even the desire
for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the
seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, he that loses
his soul will save it. But the life of the seed, the finding of the
bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary
sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of heaven “in heaven there is no
ownership. If any there took upon him to call anything his own, he would
straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit.”[63] But
it is also said “To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in
the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that
receiveth it”.[64] What can be more a man’s own than this new name which
even in eternity remains a secret between God and him? And what shall we
take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall
forever know and praise some one aspect of the divine beauty better than
any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God,
loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference,
so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed
creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all
experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship,
the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be
like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note.
Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes,[65] and St. Paul
that a body is a unity of different members.[66] Heaven is a city, and a
Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because
each has something to tell all the others—fresh and ever fresh news of
the “My God” whom each finds in Him whom all praise as “Our God”. For
doubtless the continually successful, yet never completed, attempt by
each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by
means whereof earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is
also among the ends for which the individual was created.

For union exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this point of
view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things.
Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind the times.
Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was
God. But God created: He caused things to be other than Himself that,
being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead
of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His bread upon the waters. Even
within the creation we might say that inanimate matter, which has no
will, is one with God in a sense in which men are not. But it is not
God’s purpose that we should go back into that old identity (as, perhaps,
some Pagan mystics would have us do) but that we should go on to the
maximum distinctness there to be re-united with Him in a higher fashion.
Even within the Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word
should _be_ God, it must also be _with_ God. The Father eternally begets
the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within
itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere
arithmetical unity or self identity.

But the eternal distinctness of each soul—the secret which makes of the
union between each soul and God a species in itself—will never abrogate
the law that forbids ownership in heaven. As to its fellow-creatures,
each soul, we suppose, will be eternally engaged in giving away to all
the rest that which it receives. And as to God, we must remember that the
soul is but a hollow which God fills. Its union with God is, almost by
definition, a continual self-abandonment—an opening, an unveiling, a
surrender, of itself. A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more
patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely
uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. We need not suppose
that the necessity for something analogous to self-conquest will ever be
ended, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this
sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them),
there may be something not all unlike pains in heaven (God grant us soon
to taste them).

For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all
creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in
sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified He
“did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done
at home in glory and gladness”.[67] From before the foundation of the
world He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience.
And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the
Son.[68] And, with submission, as becomes a layman, I think it was truly
said “God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there
were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself”.[69] 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. This is not a heavenly law which we can escape
by remaining earthly, nor an earthly law which we can escape by being
saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not earth, nor
nature, nor “ordinary life”, but simply and solely Hell. Yet even Hell
derives from this law such reality as it has. That fierce imprisonment in
the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality;
the negative shape which the outer darkness takes by surrounding and
defining the shape of the real, or which the real imposes on the darkness
by having a shape and positive nature of its own.

The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became an
apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the
first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means
touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in
your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. But when it flies to and
fro among the players too swift for eye to follow, and the great master
Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in
the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then
indeed the eternal dance “makes heaven drowsy with the harmony”. All
pains and pleasures we have known on earth are early initiations in the
movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable
with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its
uncreated rhythm, pain and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is
joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not
even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good
Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it.
The size and emptiness of the universe which frightened us at the outset
of this book, should awe us still, for though they may be no more than a
subjective bye-product of our three dimensional imagining, yet they
symbolise great truth. As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are
we men and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are to space
itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the
created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us
Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no man nor
angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the
work that he “maketh from the beginning to the end”. For they are all
derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover
their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and
is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no
opposite.




APPENDIX


(This note on the observed effects of pain has been kindly supplied by R.
Havard, M.D., from clinical experience.)

Pain is a common and definite event which can easily be recognised: but
the observation of character or behaviour is less easy, less complete,
and less exact, especially in the transient, if intimate, relation of
doctor and patient. In spite of this difficulty certain impressions
gradually take form in the course of medical practice which are confirmed
as experience grows. A short attack of severe physical pain is
overwhelming while it lasts. The sufferer is not usually loud in his
complaints. He will beg for relief but does not waste his breath on
elaborating his troubles. It is unusual for him to lose self-control and
to become wild and irrational. It is rare for the severest physical pain
to become in this sense unbearable. When short, severe, physical pain
passes it leaves no obvious alteration in behaviour. Long-continued pain
has more noticeable effects. It is often accepted with little or no
complaint and great strength and resignation are developed. Pride is
humbled or, at times, results in a determination to conceal suffering.
Women with rheumatoid arthritis show a cheerfulness which is so
characteristic that it can be compared to the _spes phthisica_ of the
consumptive: and is perhaps due more to a slight intoxication of the
patient by the infection than to an increased strength of character. Some
victims of chronic pain deteriorate. They become querulous and exploit
their privileged position as invalids to practise domestic tyranny. But
the wonder is that the failures are so few and the heroes so many; there
is a challenge in physical pain which most can recognise and answer. On
the other hand, a long illness, even without pain, exhausts the mind as
well as the body. The invalid gives up the struggle and drifts helplessly
and plaintively into a self-pitying despair. Even so, some, in a similar
physical state, will preserve their serenity and selflessness to the end.
To see it is a rare but moving experience.

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common
and also more hard to bear. 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”. Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the
conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain
will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is
devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the
dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even
chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen,
harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered
steel.

In actual insanity the picture is darker. In the whole realm of medicine
there is nothing so terrible to contemplate as a man with chronic
melancholia. But most of the insane are not unhappy or, indeed, conscious
of their condition. In either case, if they recover, they are
surprisingly little changed. Often they remember nothing of their
illness.

Pain provides an opportunity for heroism; the opportunity is seized with
surprising frequency.




FOOTNOTES


[1]_Scale of Perfection_, I, xvi.

[2]_I.e._, never made at the beginnings of a religion. _After_ belief in
    God has been accepted, “theodicies” explaining, or explaining away,
    the miseries of life, will naturally appear often enough.

[3]XVII, xxii.

[4]_Fasti_, III, 296.

[5]_Aen._ VII, 172.

[6]Fragm. 464. Sidgwick’s edition.

[7]Ezek. i, 18.

[8]Gen. xxviii, 17.

[9]Ps. xi, 8.

[10]The original meaning in Latin may have been “power _over_ or _in_
    all”. I give what I take to be current sense.

[11]_E.g._, every good conjuring trick does something which to the
    audience with their _data_ and their power of reasoning, seems
    self-contradictory.

[12]Luke xii, 57.

[13]Jer. ii, 5.

[14]Heb. xii, 8.

[15]Jer. xviii.

[16]I Pet. ii, 5.

[17]Jer. ii, 2.

[18]Ezek. xvi, 6-15.

[19]Jas. iv, 4, 5. Authorised Version mistranslates.

[20]Eph. v, 27.

[21]_Prometheus Vinctus_, 887-900.

[22]Jer. xxxi, 20.

[23]Hos. xi, 8.

[24]Matt, xxiii, 37.

[25]Rev. iv, II.

[26]_Met._, XII, 7.

[27]1 John iv, 10.

[28]I mention the Incarnate God among human teachers to emphasize the
    fact that the _principal_ difference between Him and them lies not in
    ethical teaching (which is here my concern) but in Person and Office.

[29]Jas. i, 13.

[30]_Serious Call_, cap. 2.

[31]N. P. Williams. _The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin_, p. 516.

[32]_De Civitate Dei_, XIV, xiii.

[33]_I.e._, an account of what _may have been_ the historical fact. Not
    to be confused with “myth” in Dr. Niebuhr’s sense (_i.e._, a
    symbolical representation of non-historical truth).

[34]This is a development of Hooker’s conception of Law. To disobey your
    _proper_ law (_i.e._, the law God makes for a being such as you)
    means to find yourself obeying one of God’s lower laws: _e.g._, if,
    when walking on a slippery pavement, you neglect the law of Prudence,
    you suddenly find yourself obeying the law of gravitation.

[35]Theologians will note that I am not here intending to make any
    contribution to the Pelagian-Augustinian controversy. I mean only
    that such return to God was not, even now, an impossibility. Where
    the initiative lies in any instance of such return is a question on
    which I am saying nothing.

[36]I Cor. xv, 22.

[37]Sir James Jeans’ _The Mysterious Universe_, cap. 5.

[38]Gen. xlvi, 4.

[39]Or perhaps it would-be safer to say “of creatures”. I by no means
    reject the view that the “efficient cause” of disease, or some
    disease, may be a created being other than man (see Chapter IX). In
    Scripture Satan is specially associated with disease in Job, in Luke
    xiii, 16, I Cor. v, 5, and (probably) in I Tim. i, 20. It is, at the
    present stage of the argument, indifferent whether all the created
    wills to which God allows a power of tormenting other creatures are
    human or not.

[40]The modern tendency to mean by “sadistic cruelty” simply “great
    cruelty”, or cruelty specially condemned by the writer, is not
    useful.

[41]_Leviathan_, Pt. I, cap. 6.

[42]Hooker. _Laws of Eccl. Polity_, I, i, 5.

[43]_De Civitate Dei_, XVI, xxxii.

[44]Heb. ix, 22.

[45]Plato. _Phæd._, 81, A (_cf._ 64, A).

[46]Keats. _Hyperion_, III, 130.

[47]Mark x, 27.

[48]Heb. ii, 10.

[49]On the two-edged nature of pain, see Appendix.

[50]_Cf._ Brother Lawrence, _Practice of the Presence of God_, IVth
    conversation, November 25th, 1667. The “one hearty renunciation”
    there is “of everything which we are sensible does not lead us to
    God”.

[51]_Summa Theol._, I, II^ae, Q. xxxix, Art. 1.

[52]John iii, 19; xii, 48.

[53]See von Hügel, Essays and Addresses, 1st series, _What do we mean by
    Heaven and Hell?_

[54]The conception of a “second chance” must not be confused either with
    that of Purgatory (for souls already saved) or of Limbo (for souls
    already lost).

[55]Matt. xxv, 34, 41.

[56]_Symbolism and Belief_, p. 101.

[57]Luke xiii, 16.

[58]But also with J. Wesley, _Sermon_ LXV. _The Great Deliverance._

[59]That is, its participation in the heavenly life of men _in_ Christ
    _to_ God; to suggest a “heavenly life” for the beast _as such_ is
    probably nonsense.

[60]Rom. viii, 18.

[61]I am not, of course, suggesting that these immortal longings which we
    have from the Creator because we are men, should be confused with the
    gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who are in Christ. We must not
    fancy we are holy because we are human.

[62]George Macdonald. _Alec Forbes_, cap. XXXIII.

[63]_Theologia Germanica_, LI.

[64]Rev. ii, 17.

[65]_Politics_, II, 2, 4.

[66]I Cor. xii, 12-30.

[67]George Macdonald. _Unspoken Sermons: 3rd Series_, pp. 11, 12.

[68]John xvii, 1, 4, 5.

[69]_Theol. Germ._, XXXII.