The problem of pain and death for Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis

Here is a speech I gave at my college in which I discuss these two thinkers’ beliefs on the problem of pain and death.

For Lewis, the Christian, the believer in a loving God, the fundamental philosophical problem is how a loving and powerful God can allow pain. This dilemma presupposes something that not every religion admits: and that is that pain is real and it is bad. Some religious traditions hold that pain and suffering are, finally, illusory, unreal. This is not the position of Christianity. In the Passion of the Christ Christianity places front and center the reality that this life is one in which suffering is inevitable and that even God suffers for our sake.

The reality of suffering is also, as Lewis admits, a real problem for the believer. It is not something that can be pushed aside by verbal slight of hand as too many people try to do in our moments of grief. Hurt, pain, and suffering are real problems. Not only in the sense that they must be endured uncomfortably but in the deeper sense that they raise troubling questions about God’s character, His power, and even His existence. Here’s an example. A few years ago I read about several young Amish children playing in a cedar chest. The lid closed, the latch fell, clicked, and locked them in. All the children suffocated. How hard would it be for an omnipotent God to lift that little latch? Why didn’t He? True, we cannot know the answer, but why is our ignorance a comfort? Should it be? Why is God’s inscrutability something which we take refuge in rather than a source of supreme indignation? God cares enough about us, we are taught, that he would make himself human. So why wouldn’t he let us on the secret of our human suffering?

Pain is universal. At its worst it can be chronic, debilitating physically and debilitating mentally, of simply unimaginable intensity and awfulness.

How do Christians like Lewis respond to the problem of pain?

Lewis and other Christians start with the belief that suffering is real but that God shares in our suffering. Jesus found amazing pain in his rejection and in his moment on the cross. This fact does not make our suffering less—pain cannot be talked away—but it does give it a context. Pain does not have the final say in our identity. God knows about our suffering, He has felt it before, and He is not removed from us on account of it.

More, Lewis and other Christians believe that though God does not create evil, he can use it for good. Here we see a basic pattern in Christian thought, one of Creation, Fall, partial restoration for all, and hope of total restoration for some—and maybe all. We were created good by God; our rebellion disordered all of nature. Pain and suffering were two of the chief results of our rebellion.

The partial consolation—the consolation for all humanity--is that from the twin horrors of pain and death come the great joys we find in this life. Love comes in large measure from our intuition that life is precious in part because it is contingent and short. Why are diamonds more valuable than sand? One reason is because they are more scarce. Could we love our loved ones as much if we were to live forever on this earth? If all people were interchangeable? In this world, love and death are forever joined. People are not replaceable. Once lost, great good has exited the world. And from this intuition we recognize the worth and infinite value of our loved ones.

Even pain is not without its consolation. Pain teaches empathy; it draws us closer to one another than if we were only to feel pleasure. Don’t we grow closest to one another during times of grief? Doesn’t our heart stretch the most when we see those we love suffering? We learn virtues of courage and patience from pain. How could we have heroes or any nobility if there were no obstacles to overcome and endure? How could there be any human greatness without pain and suffering? Why do women love to share birthing experiences with one another? It’s because of the pain they endure. They’re heroes because of that pain.

These consolations—the consolation of love and human greatness—are open to all people. To the Christian or the believer, pain also teaches us this fundamental truth about reality: we are not self-sufficient. We are dependent in our well-being upon God. Pain teaches submission to God and through that submission, humility. For the believer, humility is rewarded with the further consolation of Heaven, where all pain is abolished. Pain cannot be talked out of existence, but it can be given a context, and that context for Christians is hope.

Life after death is mysterious. But it is not fundamentally more mysterious than life out of nothingness. Or being out of nothingness.

For Freud, the materialist, the problem is not so much pain and death but life itself. Why is there something rather than nothing? More: Why, even if there is something rather than nothing, is that something so often good? Why is there beauty? Why is so much of life pleasant and lovely? Why do some people stake their entire lives for what they believe is true? Why does dust rise up from the ground, gain consciousness, only to tremble when it contemplates returning to the ground yet again?

Freud speaks of the “painful riddle of death.” But it strikes me that for the materialist, there is no riddle at all. Before Freud was Freud he was a nonentity for billions of years. After his death he shall return to that same nothingness for an eternity. Being nothing did not bother him before his birth. Why should the prospect of it bother him during life? Thinking about history before you are born doesn’t make you anxious. Why not? Freud has no real answer for that riddle.

Freud’s materialism is curious for another reason. He is angry and bitter and nauseated by the injustice of a world that is so cold and indifferent to human suffering. But why should we even care about the suffering of humans? Who cares, if there is no fundamental difference between humans and TinkerToys? Freud apparently is operating under the assumption that the default position of man should be happiness. But why? In a material world, why shouldn’t the default position be suffering? How can Freud sense injustice unless he first has a sense of what is just-- but just how does he derive that conception from all those atoms? In some ways Freud is operating from a quite Christian perspective, from the belief that the world was made good and there really is something wrong with the world. There is nothing wrong with the temperature of the sun or the height of Mt. Everest or the fact that cows have four stomachs. These truths just are. So if we are finally just matter in motion, how can there be injustice?

Freud derides religion as childish, but he too is driven by hope, specifically by the hope of happiness. This is the hope of psychoanalysis. But why should he have this hope? All around him he sees misery. He himself was prone to depression. Why the hope unless he believes that the world was designed in a fundamental way for our happiness? Why is he bitter? One cannot be bitter without expectations of something better. Why does he expect more? Certainly his materialism cannot account for this.

In short, Lewis struggles with the problem of pain and death and Freud suffers from the problem of life and goodness. I am heavily biased toward Lewis’s position, for two reasons.

First: Lewis can provide a story for both life and death, of goodness and suffering, of the creation, the fall, the restoration. We may not find that story compelling but at least he has a story to offer. Freud has no adequate explanation for either the existence of being or of human life or why human beings so often expect the world to be favorably inclined toward them. This leads to a second point: Lewis can explain himself—his yearning, his search for truth—in a way that Freud cannot. For Freud life itself is meaningless mystery. Freud himself cannot be fully explained by his own materialism. His own self-loathing, his own bitterness, and his own terror of death make no sense from the standpoint of materialism. In contrast, Lewis’s hope for eternity is explained nicely by his view of the world. It might be explained like this. For every universal yearning of mankind there is an objective corollary. Hunger is satisfied by food. Lust by sex. Thirst by drink. Curiosity by knowledge. Loneliness by society. Boredom by activity. Well, isn’t there also a universal yearning for eternal peace and fullness of life? Don’t we all yearn for something beyond what we have? Something that this life cannot satisfy? Why would all our yearnings save this one be satisfied, at least in principle? The Christian makes sense of our restlessness and our yearning by claiming that this world is not our home. Our home is elsewhere.

With respect to pain and death, Lewis says, the choices are these: (1) either there is no God; or (2) God is cruel; or (3) God allows pain because it is necessary. If we accept that there is no god, it is impossible to explain either being or life or ourselves. If God is cruel, then it raises the question why so much goodness exists. The last choice, that God is good but finds our pain to be necessary for our own fulfillment helps explain why we have life, why there is good in this life, and why we hope for better.