Calvin McShane and the Collapse of Theodicy

This essay continues my ongoing dialogue between A Pleasant Fiction and C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. While the earlier comparison traced how both books approach grief, this one turns to Calvin McShane’s deeper philosophical crisis—not just the loss of faith, but the collapse of theodicy itself: the idea that divine goodness can coexist with human suffering.

I. Introduction

In A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis wrestles with God, trying to reconcile divine love with human pain. Calvin McShane, the narrator of A Pleasant Fiction, faces grief in the aftermath of faith’s collapse. But his story is not simply one of disbelief. It is a meditation on what remains when every theological explanation breaks down—a reckoning with the collapse of theodicy itself.

Calvin’s loss is not an intellectual crisis so much as an existential one. He no longer debates the problem of suffering; he lives inside it.

II. The Hidden God Problem

In The Wake of Expectations, during his confession with Father Caughlin, Calvin first voices his frustration with abstract solutions to divine foreknowledge and free will.

The theologian’s solutions (Calvin specifically expresses skepticism over the Molinist solution) fall flat for him—logically incoherent, off-topic, intellectually dishonest or evasive. The book doesn’t explicitly delve into the details of Calvin’s personal theology, but it lives in the subtext.

By A Pleasant Fiction, Calvin’s skepticism has deepened, both as a result of continued intellectual introspection and lived experience. When he loses his unborn son, the question of God’s existence becomes meaningless. Whether God is absent or merely hiding, the result is the same: silence in the moment of greatest need.

Lewis agonizes over that silence; Calvin accepts it as fact. What Lewis treats as divine testing, Calvin reads as the ordinary condition of existence.

The lived experience of absence is enough.

A world in which God hides looks exactly like a world in which God does not exist.

III. Mystery as Love?

Lewis leans heavily on the idea that God still loves us, even when His ways seem cruel. Calvin rejects that move as incoherent. If divine love is indistinguishable from cruelty, then to call it “love” is to empty the word of meaning. Mystery does not reconcile love and suffering—it collapses the categories entirely.

This is why Calvin mocks the platitudes so often offered to explain suffering. “God works in mysterious ways” becomes, in his telling, a cruel joke.

And when someone suggests that Jared’s suffering could be redemptive, Calvin snaps:

“If you believe that, you probably believe it’s because somebody ate a f—ing apple.”

In that moment, theology’s explanatory power evaporates. For Calvin and his family, Jared is cognitively incapable of moral transgression. His father even muses that “[Jared] has a one-way ticket to heaven.” What redemption through suffering does an innocent require? Or, Calvin suggests, perhaps we are to believe that the redemption is a vicarious one for his family?

Like Christ, Jared must suffer for their sins. To give his family members an opportunity to prove themselves worthy. To provide for their expiation, redemption, and salvation.

Calvin finds that notion repugnant. “Is this the best an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being can do?” he asks. “Find a better way to serve your mysterious purpose.”

The story of original sin, the entire architecture of divine justice, collapses under the weight of his brother’s pain.

IV. From Rage to Resignation

But the flashback to the unborn son is the true climax of Calvin’s loss of faith.

Forced into an impossible choice—watch his wife suffer terribly and lose the child anyway, or end the pregnancy and live with the knowledge of complicity—he erupts:

“If I still believed in God, I’d say He was cruel… I’d say f— you too.”

Later losses—his father, his brother Jared—unfold in the aftermath. His refrain, “If I still believed…,” is not hesitation but resignation. God has already failed him. There is no one left to rage against.

In A Grief Observed, Lewis eventually apologizes for his blasphemies, explaining that they were born of anguish, not conviction. Calvin offers no such retraction. His anger is not performative; it is diagnostic. He is not testing God’s patience but describing the feeling of His absence.

For Calvin, there is no God to offend, and hence no one for him to apologize to.

V. Wet Feet on the Beach

Calvin’s position can be summed up by a twist on the famous “Footprints in the Sand” parable.

In the original, a man walks along a metaphorical beach with Jesus, the length of which represents his life, each step representing a moment from his past. The two of them leave footprints, side-by-side, in the sand as they walk together along the water’s edge. But when the man looks back at the hardest times in his life, he sees only one set of footprints. “Where were you, Lord?” he asks. Jesus replies, “When you saw only one set of footprints, that was when I carried you.”

Calvin would likely ask, “Then why were my feet still wet?”

It’s bitter. It’s funny. And it’s true. It’s a man’s lived experience confronting a comforting platitude.

He walked through suffering—he was not carried. Whether God was absent or hidden makes no difference—the result is soaked feet, not divine rescue.

In a world where faith once explained pain and psychology later mapped it, Calvin’s soaked-feet realism belongs to a third era—one that accepts grief as elemental, not exceptional.

VI. Conclusion

Calvin’s project is not to prove that God does not exist. He lives in the aftermath of that conclusion. Nor does he endeavor to lead anyone to apostasy. He’s merely describing his experience, one which doesn’t require God’s nonexistence, but only makes sense in His absence.

That absence, whether deliberate or inherent, collapses theodicy. What survives is not theology but endurance.

Friendship, art, memory, and continuity become his “pleasant fictions.” They are not escapist illusions but necessary acts of meaning-making in a silent universe. They may not be perfect, but they are undeniably present.

Calvin doesn’t resolve the problem of suffering; he simply survives it.

And in that survival—in his willingness to keep walking, feet soaked but uncarried—he discovers something that no system of belief could ever deliver: the quiet dignity of persistence.

His pleasant fictions are not escapes from truth but shelters within it—fragile, human, and finally enough.

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