Epistle to Ansgar: Letter 16 (The Problem of Pain)
04 May 2025 AD
Feast Day of St John Paine
Dear Godson,
In prior letters we examined reasons for our faith in the Lord. Let us now examine reasons for doubt, and, if possible how to answer or assuage such doubts. Let us start with the hardest question of all: the Problem of Pain.
Today is the feast day of Saint John Payne, and so perhaps apt for the topic.
Today is also the feast day for the Forty Martyrs of England, among whom St John Payne is numbered. While hiding in estate of the widowed Lady Petre, he was denounced by John “Judas” Eliot (a rapist, murderer, and thief who made a career out of denouncing Catholics for bounty), who falsely accused him of conspiring to murder Queen Elizabeth. After perjured testimony and a preordained verdict, Payne was imprisoned and tortured in the Tower of London for nine months, and finally condemned, hanged, drawn, and quartered. He never renounced his Catholic faith.
The histories of secular kings and conquerors boast of their victories, of armies routed, cities burned, lands looted. Our history of sacred martyrs boast instead of mild submission to those betrayals, torments, executions, and deaths, which never separated the saints we venerate from the love of God. It is an attestation of the impossible power of the Lord.
By such examples we see that the world and all worldly powers of coercion, the all torture cells, impaling poles, hot irons, racks and wheels, deathcamps, gas chambers, mass graves and all the machinery of despotism, all the fiery weapons, blades and barbs of all the legions of the world, cannot overcome the spiritual power of a soul at rest within the blessed protection of heaven.
The enmity of the world toward heaven is no mystery: we are behind enemy lines, for Adam surrendered this world to the Prince of the World, and all the powers and principalities and authorities that rule the nations of man, and defy the will of heaven. Fallen angels and the wicked men who serve them hate Christ and hate His servants.
But why they are permitted to torment and vex the innocent is a deeper question, and one, perhaps no word can answer. For not only are the innocent put to pain by evildoers, by also evil events issuing from the cruelty of fortune, such as wars and famines, or events issuing from no human hand, such as storms and quakes and floods, pests and plagues.
And even if ever there were a man so fortunate that he lives his life without seeing sorrow or disaster, war or famine, pestilence or poverty, one day must die. If he is remembered after death, or his city or his nation, in time oblivion covers all. All things go extinct, all victories are vain, all monuments are dust. Even the moon and sun one day will go dark, and, after eons, all the stars. Why does God allow this?
This is one of the few arguments uttered by a skeptic which any logical force. The suffering of the guilty needs no explanation; but the suffering of the innocent does. Suffering needed for some medicinal or educational point needs no explanation; but pointless suffering does.
The argument runs that a benevolent God, wishing only the best for His creatures, would not subject them to unjust or pointless suffering: and yet nothing is more clearly seen by men than that all mortal life, including babes who have never sinned, are subject to suffering and death even before their birth, as are animals who cannot sin.
Why do we suffer? To say our Creator created evil argues against His benevolence.
To say the Omnipotent lacks the power to prevent evil argues against His omnipotence.
To say the Omniscient lacks the prudence to foresee and forestall evil argues against His omniscience.
To say evil issued from a second creator agues against our Creator being God.
If evil was created from another source then the Creator created some things in heaven and earth, seen and unseen, but not all. In such a case, He is not the true creator and source of all things. He is, at best, a co-creator; or, at worst, he is a demiurge.
If God is a co-creator, such as the Zoroastrians and Manicheans preach, a good creator who creates good things equal to an evil creator creates evils, then the good creator must lack the desire, the power, or the foresight to forestall the evil one. He therefore is not supreme in benevolence, not omnipotent, not omniscient. The good co-creator is not God.
If God is a demiurge, such as the Gnostics preach, then the true creator created a realm older and more perfect than ours. He created the physical world, but not the spiritual world, making only a mockery of creation, through incompetence, ignorance or malice. He is inferior in power and wisdom, perhaps in rebellion against, whatever higher power created him. In such a case, he is a sub-creator, not the Creator, and not the God.
By definition, the twin or triple or twelvefold gods of a pantheon cannot be equally omnipotent and omniscient when compared to the other, for the same reason an infinite line cannot be extended to twice its length. There are no multiples of an absolute. Omnipotence implies monotheism.
In order to be God, God must be One God. There can be no other. (Even if, by some mystery, a Son is begotten of God or a Spirit proceeds from Him, so that God is a Trinity of persons, nevertheless in substance Father, Son and Spirit can and must be One.) Logically, if God is one of many gods, He is not God, merely a god.
A common counterargument to answer the skeptic is to say that if the Creator is real, therefore is benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient and one, therefore pointless and unjust suffering is not real. The counterargument runs that if the pain seems real, but if we only knew the deeper meaning and wider context which only divine wisdom see and knows, all mortal pain would seem just and justifiable.
For better or worse, to say that all mortal suffering, despite all seeming, is an illusion of the senses, or a deception of our limited viewpoint, and that all pain serves a greater unknown good is a feasible answer, perhaps correct, but unsatisfying.
It assures us that there is an answer. It merely does not say what the answer actually is. Only God knows.
Neither a mother hovering over a sickly child’s crib nor widow weeping over a good man’s grave will find much comfort in an answer known to heaven but hidden from her.
One must wonder how any pain can be necessary in the wider context, or to serve the greater good. This implies limits hinder the Omnipotent, which is something of a paradox.
For man, the aches and injuries of an athlete in training, the humiliation and fatigue of a soldier in bootcamp, the injustice and folly of human magistrates and princes, or the rigors and pains of surgery, are needed to achieve some goal that cannot be reached by other means, or to avoid other outcomes less desirable, as defeat, downfall, anarchy or death. There are no other possibilities.
But all things are possible with God.
For the Creator of the universe, who can see the ends of all forking pathways of human life from genesis to eschaton at once, and who can ordain the laws of nature and compose the story of history howsoever wished, can select any means imaginable to achieve any ends imaginable.
Only the unimaginable idea of God being ungodly cannot come to pass. For God to become man, to suffer and die, sounds impossible, but it was done. But for God to be the devil is impossible, because God will not will evil. I do not say this is because God is limited by necessity; I say this because necessity is limited by God.
In the mortal realm, there is no way to win glory in arenas or battlefields without struggle, no way to rear children without sacrifice. There is no land nor age were poverty and plagues are unknown.
There are tales of fabled realms such Atlantis, Hyperborea, Cockaigne, El Dorado, or Jannah where demigods never know defeat, utopians who never know warfare, gluttons never know hunger, misers never know poverty, or sybarites are never lack concubines.
These places are fictional, yes, but no more impossible for the Almighty than planting the Garden of Eden. Had heaven decreed a world established with other rules of nature, other means might reach these desired ends and involve other pains and sacrifices, or none.
Even in our world, beasts do not till the soil for their bread, nor do birds give birth in labor-pains, nor do fish die of thirst, no penguins perish from sunstroke. Neither holy angels are sensible of pain, nor does the risen Christ in his glorified body suffer pain from the scars of his five wounds.
Moreover, God created Adam fullborn, and was not restricted to rearing him up from childhood. Christ multiplied loaves and fishes, and turned water into wine, without the intermediate steps of winnowing and grinding grain, baking bread, casting nets, or trampling the grape.
Omnipotence can create any desired outcome immediately, by fiat, out of nothing. If intermediary steps are not necessary, then painful intermediate steps are not.
In sum, any benefit or any goal, medical or moral, to be gained by the means of suffering pain is one an omnipotent God, at His good pleasure, could have bestowed either by a painless means, or directly. If God needed me to suffer setbacks to learn better, He could have created me full-born out of the dust of the earth at once by fiat fully grown and unfallen, with any lesson needed for my wellbeing instinctively inserted into my character at the outset.
So the answer that God allows the innocent to suffer pain because pain is necessary for growth or health is insufficient, because God, being omnipotent, could very well have created a world where growth or health was gained painlessly, or could have created anyone or everyone fully mature, as angels are.
The irony is that, in fact, God did create a world where Adam was fully grown and in perfect health, born without sin, knowing all he needed to know and where angels were created and pure and immaculate beings, creatures of pure intellect, incapable of inflicting or suffering physical pain. Man before the Fall of Man had Eden. Angels before the Fall of Lucifer had Heaven.
Since childhood, I have heard the smug atheist argument that if God were real, He would be perfect, and, being perfect, would not and could not create any being willing or able to fall. A perfect God cannot or should not create imperfect beings.
A perfect God, so the argument runs, would people the world with creatures unable to sin, or insensible of pain. Since God did not do this, He could not have, and is therefore not God.
The irony is that, in fact, God did create a world with creatures unable to sin, namely animals and plants. He create stones and stars and all fashion of handsome inanimate objects that are insensible of pain, seas and mountains, storms and meteors, rainbows and Saturn’s rings.
The first atheist counter-argument replies that a truly omnipotent, benevolent, and omniscient Creator, if He existed, should be able to create animate, living and intelligent beings, as fair as any rainbow, as alive as any lion, but also as incarnate as Christ Himself, in bodies glorified and bright to behold, agile and subtle and incapable of pain, free from all pain and evil, but making them unwilling or unable to depart from that initial perfection.
The second atheist counter-argument replies He should have created all the angels but Lucifer (whom he should have foreseen beforehand would fall, and so refused to create him in the first place), and created Adam with no Eve, planted no Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the midst of paradise, and established a guard around the tree, a cherub with a flaming sword, preventing any trespass, or cursed the serpent with dumbness before he spoke, not after.
If He exists, He could and would have done this, but He did not, so he does not.
The first counter-argument was already answered: God created Man and Angels as perfect beings. The idea that a perfect being would be unable to disobey, is a frankly childish and silly idea of perfection: the perfection of a clockmaker whose clock has all its springs and gears and place, and keeps time correctly. It is not the perfection of a mother who rears a child to be loving, honest, honorable, and virtuous, like the Virgin Mary rearing baby Jesus to manhood.
Love is voluntary or it is not love, merely animal affection or pack-loyalty. To be voluntary means that one has the power to do or not the do, the power to obey or disobey.
The great secret of the Christian teaching, which no pagan sage or philosopher, East or West, ancient or modern, is that evil is not a thing in the same way darkness or vacuum is not a thing. It is a lapse, and absence, or a perversion of a thing. We have a name for it, of course, the same way we have a name for that absence of solid earth underfoot we call a pit, or cavern, or well, or cliffside. We have a name for it for the same reason we have a name for asphyxiation, or starvation, or loneliness, because the sudden absence of a place to step leads to treading on nothing, which is a fall.
The one and only thing God cannot do is be ungodly. He cannot be absent when He is ever-present, He cannot be weak when He is almighty, He cannot be imprudent when he is all-knowing. He cannot do evil or create evil, because His nature is His will and His will is His nature: He is essentially good. He is the necessary an supreme being, and all that exists depends on Him for existence. Evil is a lapse of being, a yearning for unreality, an attempt at suicide, an adherence to a self-destructive vice, or a desire to be more real and more sovereign than God, to know more than God, or be holier than God, more worthy of worship and praise. Evil is the desire to have evil be good and God be not.
Adam was made in God’s image, and, like his Creator, Adam has creative power. The power of creation includes not only whatever artistic genius allowed Adam in Eden to compose psalms of praise at dawn and join the angels and songbirds in their praise of the rising sun, but also to rear and refashion himself in vice or virtue, in good or evil, and frame the character of mankind, to father children, and to make his children in his own image.
The answer to the second argument is that it not good for man to be alone, or never come into being, or to prevent man from freely falling into an evil from which he can be freely saved. The atheist argument boils down to a petulant statement that life is so painful, it is better never to have had been born in the first place, not just me in my present pain, but all of existence for all of time, from the first atom to the final star.
This is not just unimaginable, it is logically absurd. God, as has been said, is the ultimate and necessary being, the Supreme Being, both first cause and final end of all chains of cause and effect, all actions and reactions, animate and inanimate. God is I AM WHO AM. Should He have foreseen that life would entail pain and evil and so never created anyone nor anything, but merely dwelt in perfect calmness and serenity alone forever? That may be what Buddha would or should have done, but God is Love, and Love is abundant and overabundant.
A good father would not strangle a child in his crib, no, not even baby Cain who would grow up to murder his brother Abel. He would cure the evil, either in life, or in the afterlife, and those exiled from Eden, when the time of exile was done, and lessons learned, be returned, and called back to the promised land.
The answer to the problem of pain is not an answer easily put into words, but no answer easily put into words could cure the hurts of the sick and wounded, ease the heartache of mourners, or silence the contrite groans of sinners. Words cannot numb the sting of a single thorn prick.
But words can reply to the despair or the skepticism of asking why the gift of life and the glories of creation are crowned with a crown of thorns.
God is light, is life, is goodness, and the source of all beauty and pleasure. Sin is the shadow separating us from God. Removed from God, we enter the realm of darkness, death, evil, ugliness and pain. God can and may use pain to wake us from sin and return us to the proper path back to Him, for God can use all things, including evil things, to make good come from them. But God did not make the evil, nor was it part of His eternal design. We, the creatures He created, we made the evil. Bad angels and bad men made it.
No one can know in full why God permitted this, but part of the answer is that goodness has no merit in a creature if to lack good is impossible to him: animals can be obedient or disobedient, but they cannot be sinners, and so can never be saints. Likewise, angels who cannot perish cannot be martyrs.
The option of creating a paradise for angels and an Eden for men was tried and tested. We failed the test.
If we object that our ancestor Adam bears the responsibility, and that we should not inherit the crooked human nature his curse brought upon all generations, it is sufficient to reply that if the father is exiled, his child will be born in a far country. Cain is the son and heir of Adam, for sin give birth to murder.
Likewise, if his pets and herds come with him, they will be in exile as well, so the animals, and all created things of earth, given to the dominion of Adam were harmed when he gave his sovereign birthright over to the spirits of sin and death. I myself hope that any loved pet will greet us in heaven after death, for it the beasts fell when we fell, they must rise when we rise.
If we lived in a cosmos where the sin of Adam could not be attributed to his sons, then we would live in a cosmos where the merits of Christ could not be attributed to his disciples.
It is better to create the world, and have it fall, and to save the fallen, and return them to a New Jerusalem more glorious than Eden, than never to have existed at all.
Hard as this answer is to hear, it is the answer. Solve the problem of pain in your own sins, and all the pains you cause yourself for yourself and others, before blaming God for giving you life.
The problem of pain is the problem of sin. God sacrificed His own Son, His own incarnate self and substance, to solve that problem.
The answer to the problem of pain is Christ. Whoso accepts this answer will live.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
