C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud: Two Contrasting Worldviews

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C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Two Contrasting
Worldviews

• Eric D. Achtyes, M.D., M.S.
• Clinical Assistant Professor
• Department of Psychiatry
• Michigan State University
• College of Human Medicine
• April 3, 2009

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Overview

• Background
• Sigmund Freuds Life
• C.S. Lewis Life
• Suffering and Pain Freud and Lewis
• Discussion/Questions

3
Background

• Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr. - Book and PBS video
  The Question of God.
• Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School
  and Massachusetts General Hospital.
• Asked to teach a class on Sigmund Freud to
  undergraduates. Students wanted a countering
  opinion. Nicholi incorporated Lewis views.
• Has been teaching the course Sigmund Freud and
  C.S. Lewis Two Contrasting World Views to
  Harvard undergraduates and at the Harvard
  Medical School for gt30 years as a critical review
  of literature.
• Dr. Nicholis analyst, when he was in training,
  was Dr. Felix Deutsch, who had been Freuds
  physician when his cancer was first diagnosed.

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Bibliography

• Freud
• An Autobiographical Study
• Question of a Weltanschauung
• Lay Analysis
• Future of an Illusion
• A Religious Experience
• Totem and Taboo
• Moses and Monotheism
• Psychoanalysis and Faith
• Civilization and Its Discontents

• Lewis
• Mere Christianity
• Miracles
• Surprised by Joy
• The Screwtape Letters
• The Problem of Pain
• A Grief Observed

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Bibliography Cont.

• Other
• The Question of God, Armand Nicholi, Jr.
• The Illusion of a Future, Oskar Pfister
• Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, John, Psalms from the
  Bible.
• Freud and the Problem of God, Hans Kung

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The Question of God
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• Freud's Last SessionWritten by Mark St. Germain,
  directed by Tyler Marchant As suggested in the
  Epilogue of "The Question of God" by Dr. Armand
  M. Nicholi, Jr.
• Starring Fritz Weaver
• June 10, 2009 - June 28, 2009
• After escaping the Nazis in Vienna, legendary
  psychiatrist Dr. Sigmund Freud invites a young,
  little known professor, C.S. Lewis, to his home
  in London. Lewis expects to be called on the
  carpet for satirizing Freud in a recent book but
  the dying Freud has a more significant agenda. On
  the day England entered WW II, Freud and Lewis
  clash on the existence of God, love, sex and the
  meaning of life only two weeks before Freud
  chose to take his own.

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Sigmund Freuds Life
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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Anna Freud If you want to know my father read
  his letters.
• Sigismund Schlomo Freud, born May 6, 1856 in
  Frieberg, Moravia (Czech Republic) to Jacob and
  Amalia Freud.
• Amalia (teenager) was Jacobs (40 yrs old) 3rd
  wife. He was already a grandfather and had 2 sons
  from his first marriage, 1 older than Amalia, and
  1 a year younger.
• Freud was cared for by a nursemaid until 2 1/2
  years old. She was a devout Roman Catholic and
  took him to church with her.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• The nursemaid told me a great deal about God
  Almighty, and hell, and who instilled in me a
  high opinion of my own capacities.
• His mother called him, her 1st born, her golden
  Siggie and he was given his own room in which to
  study.
• Age lt2 Freuds younger brother, Julius, died,
  absorbing a lot of his mothers time.
• His nanny was accused of stealing and dismissed
  shortly thereafter.
• He later referred to religion, with its
  repetitive practices, as the universal
  obsessional neurosis.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• His father, Jacob, was raised an Orthodox Jew,
  but his religion faded as he aged.
• Jacob read from the Hebrew Old Testament, the
  Philippson Bible, and sent Freud a copy on his
  35th birthday.
• Sigmund never learned Hebrew and knew only a
  little Yiddish.
• Jacob was a wool merchant, and the family
  relatively poor, moved to Leipzig when Sigmund
  was 3 yo, and then 1 yr later, to Vienna,
  Austria.
• Sigmund lived and worked in Vienna until 1932,
  when at the age of 82, he escaped to London to
  avoid the Nazi invasion.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• In his teen years, Sigmund studied Judaism under
  Samuel Hammerschlag, a secular Jew who emphasized
  the historical and ethical side of Jewish
  history, rather than the religious aspects.
• At age 17, Sigmund entered the University of
  Vienna and was influenced by a philosophy
  professor, Franz Brentano, a former priest, who
  swayed Freud considerably toward a theistic
  worldview.
• A lifelong empiricist, Freud declared in a letter
  to a friend that, He Brentano demonstrates the
  existence of God with as little bias and as much
  precision as another might argue the advantage of
  the wave over the emission theory I have ceased
  to be a materialist and am not yet a theist.
• This inner ambivalence stayed with Freud his
  entire life, despite his public endorsements of
  atheism.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Freud began reading The Essence of Christianity
  by Ludwig Feuerbach and agreed with him that
  religion was the projection of human need and
  deep-seated wishes, that the substance and
  object of religion is altogether human divine
  wisdom is human wisdom the secret of theology is
  anthropology
• Freud wrote in the Future of an Illusion that
  We shall tell ourselves that it would be very
  nice if there were a God who created the world
  and was a benevolent providenceand an
  afterlifebutall this is exactly as we are bound
  to wish it to be.
• Within the medical communities of Europe, there
  was a distinct disdain for the spiritual
  worldview an assumption that empiricism was the
  only way to discover truth.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Sigmund worked in the lab of Ernest Brucke, who
  asserted that no truth existed except that
  discernible by the scientific method.
• Vienna was gt90 Catholic at the time. Freud
  faced anti-Semitism in his efforts to obtain a
  professorship at the University of Vienna,
  repeatedly being passed over for a post. He
  waited 17 years. The usual wait was 4 years.
• Medical journals at the time were filled with
  articles illustrating how Jews were profoundly
  flawed and predisposed to a host of illnesses.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Jacob Freud told his son Sigmund a story when
  Sigmund was 10 yrs old about how an anti-Semite
  had knocked his cap off into the mud and shouted
  Jew! Get off the pavement!
• His father meekly went and picked up his cap and
  kept walking.
• To Sigmund that response was unheroic conduct.
• Sigmund fought real and perceived anti-Semitism
  all his life.
• On a train Freud was once called a dirty Jew.
  He describes being not in the least frightened
  by the mob I was quite prepared to kill him

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• On Easter Sunday in 1886, at the age of 30, Freud
  opened a private practice in neuropathology.
• On Sept. 13, 1886, he married Martha Bernays in a
  Town Hall in Germany, followed by a brief Jewish
  ceremony in the home of the bride.
• Jacob Freud died in Oct. 1896, and Sigmund, 40,
  described it as the most poignant loss in a
  mans life. Despite viewing his father as a
  failure, the death struck him hard, it has
  affected me profoundly I feel quite uprooted.
• Freud began his self-analysis and proposed the
  Oedipus complex.

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Freuds Apartment Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria
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Stairway to Freuds Consultation Rooms
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Freuds Couch
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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Freuds mother died in 1930, and he was
  surprisingly unemotional I was not at the
  funeral.
• Freud and his family were exiled to London on
  June 6, 1938, fearing Nazi attacks on the Jews.
  He was made to sign a letter that he had been
  treated fairly by the Nazis prior to his
  departure.
• Freud died Sept. 23, 1939 at the age of 83. He
  had fought oral cancer for years, performing
  surgery on himself, using cocaine as an
  anesthetic. He convinced his personal physician,
  Dr. Max Schur, to administer 3 lethal doses of
  morphine, which led to his death.

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Sigmund Freud - 1931
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Golders Green Crematorium
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Freuds Memorial
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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Freud seemed to struggle between what his nanny
  had told him about having a high opinion of his
  own capacities, and the external worlds desire
  to prove him inferior.
• His ideas were new, daring and based on his
  scientific observations of human behavior. They
  were as rigorously scientific as technology at
  the time would allow.
• His theories threatened the dominant majoritys
  opinion of why humans behave the way they do.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Freuds ego, while strong, was also easily
  threatened by others. Narcissism and shame are
  often closely wed.
• His friendships with colleagues were often
  strained as Freud found discussion and
  disagreements about his theories threatening (eg,
  the splits with Adler and Jung).
• Unfortunately, Freuds superior intellect often
  left him with little regard for the opinions of
  others. For the masses are lazy and
  unintelligent arguments are of no avail against
  their passions. And, not all men are worthy of
  love.

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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Freud published gt200 scholarly works (articles,
  books, etc.).
• In 1910 he founded the International
  Psychoanalytical Association, and the journal
  Imago in 1912.
• Today Freuds accomplishments are ranked with
  those of Planck and Einstein.
• He is listed as the 6th most influential
  scientist of all time.
• He won the prestigious Goethe prize in 1930,
  and his face is on the Austrian 50 shilling note.
• He was made an Honorary Member of the British
  Royal Society of Medicine in 1935.
• President Franklin Roosevelt helped broker his
  safe transfer to London in 1938.
• He has been on the cover of Time magazine 3
  times 1924, 1939, 1993.

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Freud Museum, London
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Sigmund Freuds Life

• Thanks in large part to Freud, it is now widely
  accepted that early relationships with parents
  and caregivers strongly impacts later
  psychological health.
• These early life relationships, as we will also
  see with C.S. Lewis, profoundly influence the
  development of ones worldview.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• Clive Staples Lewis was born November 29, 1898 in
  Belfast, Ireland to Albert and Florence Lewis,
  who married August 29, 1894.
• Albert was Welsh in descent, and Florence,
  Scottish. His father worked practicing law in
  Belfast and was moody and emotional. His mother
  was cool and analytical.
• Lewis grandfather was vicar and preached at
  their local church. He would weep in the pulpit.
• Lewis fathers and grandfathers emotionality
  bred in him a distrust for emotions and religion.
  He instead embraced a materialist worldview.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• At age 4, Lewis informed his parents that he
  would go by the name Jack.
• At age 6, he first recognized beauty through
  creationmoss, twigs and flowers. He called it
  joy and described it as a type of longing
  which he eventually recognized was for a
  Person.
• From ages 6-8, his older brother, Warren was off
  at boarding school. The cool, rainy, Belfast
  weather contributed to his desire to spend time
  indoors. Lewis lived almost entirely in his
  imagination reading, drawing and writing
  stories.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• At age 9, Lewis world was turned upside down
  when his grandfather died and then his mother
  became sick with cancer and died. He recalled
  her surgery in their home and having to observe
  her corpseafter praying to God for her healing.
• Albert Lewis decided he could not care adequately
  for the boys and sent them both off to boarding
  school.
• Lewis hated boarding school. The headmaster
  Oldie was cruel. He would beat the children
  mercilessly. He was eventually convicted of
  undue cruelty and his school shut down due to a
  lack of students. He was a clergyman in the
  Church of England, a fact that was not lost on
  Lewis.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• Alone in those moments, Lewis would long for the
  holidays, much like one longed for heaven. He
  began to live by hope.
• At his second boarding school, he was comforted
  by the school Matron, Miss Cowie, a type of
  surrogate mother. She held and comforted the shy
  Lewis, as well as the other boys.
• She dabbled in the occult and shared it with the
  boys. At age 13, this served to snuff out any
  vestiges of faith that Lewis held onto. He also
  began reading classic literature where the
  authors assumed the illegitimacy of religion. She
  was eventually fired.
• Lewis was lonely and unhappy. He hated the
  snobbery of the boarding school community.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• Lewis father relented, allowing him to be
  tutored by William T. Kirkpatrick, The Great
  Knock, an atheist who taught Lewis logic and
  critical thinking. Lewis considered Christianity
  one religious myth among many.
• It was the happiest time of Lewis life. He
  spent hours reading books of his own choosing.
• He read George MacDonalds Phantastes, which
  replanted the seeds of the spiritual worldview.
• Lewis took the admission exam for Oxford
  University on December 4, 1916. He failed the
  math section, but was granted admittance through
  the Army Officer Training Corps.

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Oxford University
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C.S. Lewis Life

• Lewis became friends with Edward Paddy Moore in
  his Officers Training course.
• They agreed to care for each others parents if
  either of them were killed. Lewis arrived in the
  trenches of WWI on Nov. 29, 1917, on his 19th
  birthday.
• When Paddy was killed, Lewis took care of his
  mother until her death, calling her a surrogate
  mother.
• Lewis was wounded and returned to Oxford in 1919,
  spending the next 35 years there. After
  graduating in 1923, he taught philosophy for 1
  year before accepting a fellowship in English
  literature at Magdalen College at Oxford in 1925.

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Magdalen College, Oxford University.
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Lewis Office at Oxford
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The Bird and the Baby
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The Inklings Corner
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C.S. Lewis Life

• Lewis corresponded with many people by letter.
• He began corresponding with Helen Joy Davidman
  Gresham, a poet from the United States. She was
  divorced and surprisingly came to England to meet
  Lewis in 1952. He was taken by her wit and
  intellect. They reportedly played scrabble
  together in 5 different languages.
• In 1956, at age 57, he married her, age 41. She
  was already diagnosed with bone cancer.
• It looked like she would die, but they prayed,
  and her cancer went into remission.
• They had several years of happy marriage together
  including a trip to Greece. She died in 1960.
  Her son, Douglas, was 14 at the time.

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Marriage License
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The Kilns
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Lewis Kitchen
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Lewis Dining Room
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Lewis Sitting Room
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Lewis Bathroom
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C.S. Lewis Life

• C.S. Lewis has been called by Time magazine,
  the most influential voice for the spiritual
  worldview, and graced its cover in 1947.
• He wrote gt30 books including Surprised by Joy,
  Miracles, The Problem of Pain, A Grief
  Observed, The Screwtape Letters, Mere
  Christianity, The Great Divorce, The
  Abolition of Man, The Weight of Glory.
• As a student at Oxford, he won a triple first,
  the highest honors in 3 areas of study.
• He was awarded the position of Chair in Medieval
  and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge
  University.
• He was an immensely popular lecturer, filling
  lecture halls to standing room capacity.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• Oxford History of English Literature (OHEL)
• The Chronicles of Narnia books and movies.
• Shadowlands movie and broadway play.
• The second most recognizable voice on the BBC
  during WWII, behind Winston Churchill.

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Shadowlands
Shadowlands Opened 10/8/07, Wyndhams Theatre,
London. Closed 2/23/08, Novello Theatre,
London. William Nicholsons play Shadowlands is
set in Oxford during the 1950s and is the moving
true love story between C.S. Lewis and Helen Joy
Davidman Gresham. Lewis had remained a confirmed
bachelor until his fifties when he met and was
enchanted by Joy Davidman, an American divorcee
with 2 young children. They fell in love and
were secretly married. Lewis ensuing encounter
with love and suffering led him to reconsider
many of the beliefs he had held so staunchly
before their fateful meeting. Why love if losing
hurts so much? The pain now is part of the
happiness then. Thats the deal.
--C.S. Lewis
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Shadowlands - London
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The Chronicles of Narnia
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C.S. Lewis Life

• Lewis, too, embraced a materialist worldview for
  much of his life. Some of this may have been a
  rebellious response against his father, in part,
  for sending him away to boarding school at a time
  of intense emotional need following his mothers
  death. I maintained that God did not exist. I
  was also very angry with God for not existing.
• Later, while at Oxford, he was converted first to
  theism in 1929, and then to Christianity in 1931.
  His conversion is detailed in his book
  Surprised by Joy.
• Lewis became convinced of the existence of a
  universal Moral Law, and also of an Author for
  that law. He believed this law had to have come
  from somewhere or some-One. He also believed
  mans ability to reason pointed to a rational
  Creator.
• As a literary critic, he re-examined the
  religious myths of antiquity and became convinced
  that the Christian myth had actual historic
  validity in the coming of Jesus Christ.

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C.S. Lewis Life

• Lewis thought that our wishes for a protective
  father did not rule out the possibility of a
  protective God but instead pointed to the
  existence of one. Creatures are not born with
  desires unless satisfaction for those desires
  also exists. A baby feels hunger..there isfood.
  Men feel sexual desire..there issex.
• Lewis thought that our dissatisfaction in this
  life pointed to the fact that we were made for
  another world, otherwise, he thought, the
  universe is a fraud.
• He was loved by his colleagues for his
  intelligence, warmth and politeness. He too had
  fought battles and suffered devastating losses in
  his life, yet somehow did not become bitter and
  contentious.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Loss of his nanny.
• Anti-semitism (Freud attributed this to fear of
  castration, jealousy of Gods chosen people,
  displaced anger against Christians). During Nazi
  occupation, Freud gave cyanide pills to his
  daughter Anna in case she was tortured when
  questioned at Gestapo headquarters.
• Loss of his daughter, Sophie, and her son,
  Heinle.
• Criticisms of work psychoanalysis not
  generalizable beyond unique Viennese culture.
  Jewish science vs Aryan science.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Freud suffered from bouts of depression and
  anxiety, nicotine dependence, cocaine use, and
  the fear of death.
• Diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 at age 67.
  His doctor withheld the diagnosis for fear Freud
  would kill himself.
• He had 33 operations, usually under local
  anesthesia, for his cancer.
• He had a metal plate placed in the roof of his
  mouth and chose to eat alone.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Freud wondered how there could be a loving God
  with all of the suffering in this life?
• To friend and Christian, Oskar Pfister, Freud
  wrote how the devil do you reconcile all that
  we experience in this world with your assumption
  that there is a moral order?
• Freud believed the violent, cunning or
  ruthless man seizes the envied good things of the
  world and the pious man goes away empty. Obscure,
  unfeeling, and unloving powers determine mens
  fate.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• At the death of his beloved daughter, Sophie,
  from the influenza epidemic of 1920 Freud wrote
  to a colleague I do not know what more there is
  to say. It is such a paralyzing event, which can
  stir no afterthoughts when one is not a
  believer
• Freud wrote to another friend that neither he nor
  his wife has got over the monstrous fact of
  children dying before their parents.
• Freud wondered when my turn will come and
  wished his life to be over.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• At the loss of his 4 ½ year old grandson, Heinle,
  to tuberculosis he writes
• He was indeed an enchanting little fellow, and
  I myself was aware of never having loved a human
  being, certainly never a child, so much. I
  dont think I have ever experienced such grief
  I work out of sheer necessity fundamentally
  everything has lost its meaning for me I find
  no joy in life. I have spent some of the
  blackest days of my life sorrowing about the
  child. At last I can think of him quietly and
  talk of him without tears.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Freud could not reconcile the suffering he
  observed in his own life and the lives of those
  he loved with an all-powerful, all-loving
  Creator.
• Freud It seems not to be the case that there is
  a Power in the universe which watches over the
  well-being of individuals with parental care and
  brings all their affairs to a happy ending
  Earthquakes, tidal waves, conflagrations, make no
  distinction between the virtuous and pious and
  the scoundrel or unbeliever.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• In The Future of an Illusion, 1927, Freud says
  of believers They will have to admit to
  themselves the full extent of their helplessness
  they can no longer be the centre of the creation,
  no longer the object of the tender care on the
  part of the beneficent Providence And, as for
  the great necessities of Fate, against which
  there is no help, they will learn to endure them
  with resignation.
• And, in a letter to a friend who had lost a
  daughter As an unbelieving fatalist, I can only
  sink into a state of resignation when faced with
  the horror of death.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Freud There are the elements which seem to mock
  at all human control the earth which quakes
  diseases and the painful riddle of death,
  against which no medicine has yet been found
• Later, he writes life is hard to bear a
  permanent state of anxious expectation.
• He writes I have no dread at all of the
  Almighty. If we ever were to meet I should have
  more reproaches to make to Him than He could to
  me.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Despite professing disbelief, Freud was
  preoccupied with the idea of the devil.
• He thought that the devil represented our defiant
  spirit towards our parents just as our desire for
  a protective parent led to our conceptualization
  of God. Even if the devil were real, Freud
  thought, it was still Gods fault for allowing
  the devil to exist at all.
• Freud read Goethes Faust and Balzacs The
  Fatal Skin. Both feature a man of science,
  depressed over his lack of recognition, who makes
  a deal with the devil and considers suicide.
• Freud read The Fatal Skin on the day he chose
  to die by euthanasia.

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Suffering and Pain Freud

• Freud concludes If the believer finally sees
  himself obliged to speak of Gods inscrutable
  decrees, he is admitting that all that is left
  to him as a last possible consolation and source
  of pleasure in his sufferings is an unconditional
  submission. And if he is prepared for that, he
  could probably have spared himself the detour he
  has made.
• And yet Freud says only religion can answer
  the question of the purpose of life.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Loss of his mother. It was alien and menacing.
  My grief was overwhelmed with terror.
• Boarding school.
• WWI loss of friend, shrapnel injury, caring for
  Paddy Moores mother. She lived with Lewis and
  his brother Warren for 6-7 years before
  succumbing to Alzheimers disease.
• He suffered from loneliness, depression, and
  possibly PTSD.
• In 1929, Lewis father passed away. He showed
  little remorse.
• Rejected for Oxford chair, he finally accepted
  Cambridge chair.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940. It
  was a cerebral treatise for why pain is
  necessary.
• Lewis writes that prior to his conversion, he
  wouldnt have believed in a good God human
  history is largely a record of crime, war,
  disease and terror all civilizations pass away
  and, even while they remain, inflict peculiar
  sufferings on their own 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.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis changed his view after his conversion.
• In The Problem of Pain he argues that love
  and kindness are different things and that true
  love is tough love (ie. going to the dentist)
  love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting
  of the beloved mere kindness which tolerates
  anything except suffering in its object isat the
  opposite pole from Love.
• Lewis also believed no true happiness could be
  found apart from our Creator.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis says pain insists upon being attended
  to. God whispers to us in our pleasures but
  shouts in our pain it is His megaphone to rouse
  a deaf world. Pain as Gods megaphone is a
  terrible instrument it may lead to final and
  unrepented rebellion.
• He attributed much suffering and pain to mens
  choices saying It is men, not God, who have
  produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns,
  bayonets, and bombs and, All suffering arises
  from sin.
• Lewis views hell as God giving man the freedom
  from Him that he desires They enjoy forever the
  horrible freedom they have demanded. the doors
  are locked on the inside.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• At age 62, Lewis lost his wife, Joy, after only 4
  years of marriage.
• In A Grief Observed, 1961, he writes from a
  perspective of his feelings Arent all these
  notes the senseless writhings of a man who wont
  accept the fact that there is nothing we can do
  with suffering except to suffer it?
• He beseeches Joy My dear, my dear, come back
  for one moment The same leg is cut off time
  after time. The first plunge of the knife into
  the flesh is felt again and again.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis asks where God is during suffering? But
  go to Him when your need is desperate, when all
  other help is vain, and what do you find? A door
  slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and
  double bolting on the inside.
• And Why is He so present a commander in our
  time of prosperity and so very absent a help in
  time of trouble?
• He says But dont come talking to me about the
  consolation of religion, or I shall suspect that
  you dont understand.
• He wonders if God is The Cosmic Sadist, the
  spiteful imbecile?

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis doubt The conclusion I dread is not, So
  theres no God after all, but, So this is what
  Gods really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
• Lewis likened it to surgery concluding The
  tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then
  there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good
  God, then the tortures are necessary.
• Lewis believed in Satan and demons as fallen
  angels.
• Lewis believed that the government of the
  universe was temporarily in enemy hands. we
  are living in a part of the universe occupied by
  the rebel Enemy occupied territorythat is what
  this world is.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis believed that God created his creatures
  with free will to choose or not choose God. He
  thought the only love worth having had to be
  chosen freely, not coerced.
• He writes God created things which had free
  will. That means creatures which can go either
  right or wrong. free will, though it makes evil
  possible, is also the only thing that makes
  possible any love or goodness or joy worth
  having. A world of automata would hardly be
  worth creating.
• On Gods omniscience Of course God knew what
  would happen if they used their freedom the wrong
  way apparently He thought it worth the risk.

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Suffering and Pain Lewis

• According to his letters, Lewis never lost his
  faith entirely. For Lewis, the very fact that he
  was angry at God for the unjust, was evidence
  that there was a right and wrongthe universal
  moral law written on all human hearts.
• He writes A man does not call a line crooked
  unless he has some idea of a straight line Thus
  in the very act of trying to prove that God did
  not exist I found I was forced to assume that
  my idea of justicewas full of sense.

74
Suffering and Pain Lewis

• In June 1961, Lewis suffered from osteoporosis,
  an enlarged prostate, hydronephrosis, toxemia,
  and cardiac problems.
• July 15, 1963, he suffered a heart attack and
  lapsed into a coma, from which he eventually
  recovered.
• On November 22, 1963, Lewis brother, Warren,
  took him his tea at 4PM, heard a crash at 530PM,
  and found Lewis on his back in his room. He died
  5 minutes later.

75
The Room Where Lewis Died
76
Trinity Church
77
Lewis Gravestone
78
Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Lewis maintained his sense of humor through his
  illness. He saw death as a natural part of life.
  100 of us die and the percentage cannot be
  increased.
• His friends and family said Never was a man
  better prepared, and, About a week before his
  death he said to me, I have done all that I was
  sent into the world to do, and I am ready to go.
  I have never seen death looked in the face so
  tranquilly, and, He was a deeply kind and
  charitable man.

79
Suffering and Pain

• Both Freud and Lewis suffered great losses in
  their lives and reached very different
  conclusions about the existence of God and the
  meaning of suffering in our lives.
• Have you encountered any real pain personally, or
  through the illness of someone close to you?

80
Suffering and Pain Lewis

• Do we say with Freud? As an unbelieving
  fatalist, I can only sink into a state of
  resignation when faced with the horror of death.
• Or do we resonate with Lewis? He never got
  answers to all his questions, but received a
  rather special sort of No answer. It is not the
  locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly
  not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His
  head, not in refusal, but waiving the question.
  Like, Peace, child you dont understand.
• Do we accept a difficult situation or try to
  change it? Do we shake our fist in defiance or
  do we humbly accept our lot in life? How do we
  counsel those who are grieving losses? What
  role does faith play?

81
Suffering and Pain

• Freud, after the loss of his grandson, Heinle,
  says At last I can think of him quietly and
  talk of him without tears.
• With time, Lewis also reports healing after the
  loss of his wife, Joy Turned to God, my mind no
  longer meets that locked door Like the warming
  of a room or the coming of daylight. When you
  first notice them they have already been going on
  for some time.
• Does time heal all wounds? Is healing a Divine
  project, a human project, both?

82
Concluding Thoughts

• Both Lewis and Freud suffered pain and loss.
  Both struggled with the question of God and mans
  place in the universe.
• Each of us must also answer these questions for
  ourselves.
• How do you reconcile the question of pain and
  suffering? What arguments (cognition) and
  experiences (feelings) have informed your view?
• Are there other authors you have read that have
  swayed your view?