The First and Lowest Operation of Pain: C.S. Lewis and His Image of ‘God’s Megaphone’ for Human Suffering

Abstract

C.S. Lewis’s metaphor of ‘God’s megaphone’, an image he employed to illustrate an idea about human suffering, appears at a certain stage of his argument in the central chapter (ch. 6) of his first work of popular theology, The Problem of Pain (1940). Among the numerous images invoked throughout his writings, none perhaps is more widely known than this. From the earliest book-length study of Lewis (1949) onward, numerous quotations, allusions, and discussions that include the image of the megaphone can be found in the literature on Lewis and elsewhere; in 1957 the Dutch translation of Lewis’s book was published under the title Gods megafoon. While it would take a comprehensive reception history of The Problem of Pain for any definitive claims to be possible, the history of the ‘megaphone’ as cited in the literature suggests that this image has dominated perceptions of the book’s overall argument. The present essay will attempt to show that this dominance is a fact, and argues that this dominance finds no support in Lewis’s original argument.