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![THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 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. "61 This secret fire goes out when you use the bel- lows: 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 se- cret desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified be- fore 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"62 But it is also said "To him that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new 61 - George MacDonald. Alec Forbes [ofHowg1en], cap. xxxlll. 62 - Theologia Germanica, Ll. 96](/benjaminramey/ObsidianJournal/src/commit/dc590594d2213eb1fbdfff461cb7bd507d2952ea/Reading/Book%20notes/Exported%20image%2020240808113911-6.png)
![THE PROBLEM OF PAIN 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 beats a self for which there is no real evidence. 2. The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier gen- erations, 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.56 Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember a certain sa- cred 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 de- ity. But the doctrine of Satan's existence and fall is not among the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discov- ered 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 discov- 56 - [Editor's note] Compromise with evolution inevitably lead to such theologi- cal dead ends... In later years (cf. Is Theology Poetry? 1944, The Funeral of the Great Myth 1945 and Evolutionary Hymn 1957) Lewis expressed growing reser- vations regarding the evolutionary cosmology. 86](/benjaminramey/ObsidianJournal/src/commit/dc590594d2213eb1fbdfff461cb7bd507d2952ea/Reading/Book%20notes/Exported%20image%2020240808113911-16.png)
![HELL 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.53 1 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 mediaeval art and, indeed, by certain pas- sages 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 punish- ment ("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 53 - The concept of a "second chance" must not be confused either with that of Purgatory (for souls already saved) or of Limbo (for souls already lost). [Ed. note] Neither of these concepts have support in the New Testament, particu- larly that of purgatory, a place where souls can find a second purification from sin. 79](/benjaminramey/ObsidianJournal/src/commit/dc590594d2213eb1fbdfff461cb7bd507d2952ea/Reading/Book%20notes/Exported%20image%2020240808113911-23.png)
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