By: Tom Knoff | April 2, 2023
The Painful Personal Experiences that Influenced C. S. Lewis’s Perspective on Suffering – Part 1
Key Influences that Shaped C. S. Lewis’s Perspective on Suffering
Few people have understood suffering and how to face it like that of C.S. Lewis. Long after his death, his quote, “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,”[1] remains as penetrating as it was the day he wrote it. His remarkable perspective on pain continues to encourage and enlighten the hearts of hurting people even through our present day.
The question naturally arises as to how Lewis was able to develop such a profound understanding of human suffering. The insight that Lewis possessed regarding pain was not acquired easily, but was the bitter benefit of having plodded through the shadow-filled valleys of life; along the way, he discovered truth that would yield a unique understanding, as well as provide him with solace. This article will consider how C. S. Lewis’s extraordinary perceptions on affliction began to emerge as a result of his painful personal experiences, developed as a result of his desperate search for truth, and were refined as a result of the agonizing application of it to his life.
The Painful Personal Experiences that Influenced C. S. Lewis’s Perspective on Suffering
- S. Lewis’s understanding of suffering began to be forged at a young age, and would continue to be shaped throughout his life. Lewis encountered several difficult experiences throughout life which would influence his perspective on pain. Through his personal experiences with suffering during his childhood, and also the physical and emotional pain he encountered on the battlefields of war, there began to emerge in him an acute sensitivity to the reality of suffering. The awareness of suffering he would acquire during these two periods of life would be instrumental in the ongoing development of his understanding of it and how to cope with it.
Lewis’s Painful Experiences in Childhood
With the death of his mother, the nine year old Lewis found himself beginning a journey where suffering would relentlessly follow him throughout his life. Lewis described the period of his early childhood as “carefree,”[2] and one that was characterized by a “happy and secure home,”[3] but all of that came to an “abrupt end when his mother, at the age of forty-six, was diagnosed with cancer and passed away within seven months.”[4] In a moment, “everything that he relied on was suddenly gone. His life was bleak and different.”[5] Not only did he lose his mother, but it dealt a huge blow to his father who never fully recovered from the loss, and it would cause a strain in their relationship which would “persist for over two decades until 1929, when Albert fell into his own last illness.”[6]
The painful experience of losing his mother would set young Lewis on a path which led to many subsequent hardships, one of which was being sent off to the Wynyard boarding school. This two-year period of his life would leave lasting scars upon him, so much so that years later he would continue to describe the time as “wasted and miserable.”[7] While the school facilities were deplorable, the greater suffering he endured was due to the malicious treatment he received at the hands of the headmaster, Robert Capron, “an arbitrary and sadistic man, whose frequent rages were accompanied by canings and severe verbal abuse.”[8] The pain Capron caused was so deep, that it would take Lewis virtually his entire life to forgive the man “who had so scarred his earliest boyhood.”[9] These painful experiences Lewis endured as a child would penetrate his psyche in such a way so as to cause him to develop an acute sensitivity to the reality of pain and suffering.
Lewis’s Painful Experiences on the Battlefields of the First World War
As Lewis emerged from boyhood, he found himself in the midst of suffering once again, this time at the hands of war and death. Though he voluntarily signed up to fight in World War I out of a sense of duty,[10] he quickly discovered the painful horrors of the battlefield, and he learned that fighting in the trenches was a nightmarish experience which, according to one author “seems to have influenced Lewis’s philosophical outlook for several years after the war.”[11]
In addition to seeing the devastating effects of war, and how it further evidenced the depth of human depravity, Lewis also experienced the painful effects of battle in a very personal way. In 1918, Lewis sustained significant wounds while fighting on the Western front, an experience he would carry “for the rest of his life.”[12]
The painful effects of war left a deep imprint on Lewis, and those experiences greatly influenced the shaping of his views about God, existence, and human suffering. Two decades after the war, as a result of the suffering he had encountered on the battlefield, Lewis found himself grappling with the issue of Theodicy. In so doing, he was attempting to reconcile the reality of suffering in the world with the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful God. He wrote,
‘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 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’…are equivocal….[13]
While the wounds he received in childhood, as well as during the war, would leave lasting scars, the bittersweet irony is that it was those very scars which would remind him to keep seeking understanding about suffering and how to deal with it.
About the Author
Tom Knoff is a Senior Class Teacher of Worldview Philosophy at Grapevine Faith Christian School in Grapevine, Texas. He is in the PhD in Theology and Apologetics program at Liberty University. Tom, his wife, Kim, and family are originally from Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Copyright 2023. Bellator Christi.
Notes
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007), 604.
[2] David C. Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 25.
[3] Ibid., 27.
[4] Ibid., 30.
[5] Douglas Gresham, Jack’s Life (Nashville: Broadman and Holman, 2005), 10.
[6] Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 31.
[7] Brian Sibley, Through the Shadowlands (Grand Rapids: Revell, 2005), 29.
[8] Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 36.
[9] Downing, The Most Reluctant Convert, 37.
[10] Ibid., 82.
[11] Ibid., 83.
[12] Ibid., 83.
[13] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, 560.
