Which C.S. Lewis book was published in 1940 as an exploration of Christian suffering?

The Problem of Pain was published in 1940 as C.S. Lewis’s exploration of Christian suffering.

In The Problem of Pain, Lewis examines why suffering exists if God is good and powerful. He discusses divine omnipotence, human freedom, the Fall, hell, animal pain, and heaven. The book is an apologetic work: it aims to present a reasoned Christian response rather than a personal diary of grief.

Lewis wrote it before the death of his wife, Joy Davidman. That timing matters because readers sometimes confuse it with A Grief Observed, which records his later experience after Davidman’s death. The two books address pain from very different positions: The Problem of Pain is theological and general, while A Grief Observed is intimate and mournful.

The work became one of Lewis’s best-known religious books. Its argument is not that suffering is pleasant or easily explained, but that Christian theology interprets suffering within a larger account of freedom, creation, repentance, and redemption.