C. S. Lewis on the Love and Goodness of God

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

Right now, I’m re-reading C. S. Lewis’s book, The Problem of Pain. A delightful read, full of insight and depth.

Here are a couple of quotations that stuck me the other day, concerning the goodness and love of God:

“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 evil may not be evil.

On the other hand, if God’s moral judgment 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.” (pp. 28-29)

…

"By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingkindness; 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 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 said at the end of the 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." (pp. 31-32)

Source: C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
Originally published in 1940.

Perhaps these two quotations caught my attention because they relate well to my recent posts on divine impassibility and the question of whether or not God experiences emotions as humans do. Like ‘goodness’ and ‘love,’ qualities like ‘grief’ and ‘suffering’ must point to something that is real (in fact, more real) in God and yet at the same time something other, something perfect and beyond human experience.