Skip to main content

How does C. S. Lewis describe heaven and hell?

Clive Staples Lewis was born in 1898 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He was a former atheist who became a Christian apologist. One of the great thinkers of our time, he died just before his 65th birthday in 1963.


C. S. Lewis described heaven and hell in many of his writings, such as The Pilgrim's Regress, in which he describes hell as a black hole, and The Screwtape Letters, where demons help create an environment of self-centered competitiveness. The Great Divorce is a novel about heaven and hell. C. S. Lewis mentions hell in The Last Battle from the Chronicles of Narnia series. He also wrote about heaven and hell in an essay titled "Myth Became Fact."


In his essay "Myth Became Fact," C. S. Lewis addresses the arguments of Corineus, who argued that there were no modern Christians--all that was left of Christianity was the vocabulary and emotions that went with it, but the essential doctrines had long ago been abandoned. In Lewis's response, he talks about heaven as a marriage between myth and fact. God fills us with wonder and delight, but also reveals absolute truth, which is the ultimate reality. The pagan christs and false spirituality would be a representation of hell. Ultimately, Lewis believed that hell was the absence of God. Since God is love, hell is therefore the absence of all love, truth, light, and goodness.



"We must not be nervous about "parallels" and 'pagan Christs': they ought to be there--it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic--and is not the sky itself a myth--shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher."



In his novel The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis describes hell as a place absent from the presence of God. The people who go there are described as ghost-like, so devoid of substance that the grass doesn't even yield when they walk on it. The grass feels like needles to them. Their forms are blown up like balloons. They have chosen their own wills over the will of God, and he has given everyone a free will to choose to follow Him or go their own way. Hell is just the extension of their choice to reject him. In their ignorance or willful rebellion, those who reject Christ don't realize that they have rejected everything good and right. He depicts a bus ride in which people have arrived at a destination they don't realize has been a product of their choices. The reality exists in the distance, where heaven is. The people of no substance have chosen hell as their eternal existence. Below is a quote from The Great Divorce.



"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.' All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened."



Further quotes from The Great Divorce show Lewis's belief that the decision to reject God is also a decision to reject all goodness and true love.



"There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him." 


"'Son,' he said,' ye cannot in your present state understand eternity...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why...the Blessed will say 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' : and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.' And both will speak truly." 


"Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains."



In The Last Battle, the last book of the Chronicles of Narnia series, C. S. Lewis shows the people who chose not to follow God as hating Him, and therefore choosing to turn away. C. S. Lewis didn't go into a graphic and scary description of hell as this series was written for children, but the theme is consistent: heaven is the presence of God, and contains all love, goodness, truth and light, and hell is a place for those who choose to live apart from God. Each eternal destination is a choice. Here is a quote from The Last Battle:



"And when some looked, the expression of their faces changes terribly—it was fear and hatred. . . . And all the creatures who looked at Aslan in that way swerved to their right, his left, and disappeared into his huge black shadow, which . . . streamed away to the left of the doorway. The children never saw them again." The narrator concludes, "I don’t know what became of them."


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

etymology - Origin of the greeting "Sweet dreams".

Does anybody know the etymology of the phrase "sweet dreams"? I tried googling but did not find anything satisfying. Is this a relatively new phrase of the modern world or has this been in use for some time? I think it's the latter one. Answer The OED has the interjection as "a farewell to someone going to bed" from the 20th century: 1908 Sears Roebuck Catal. 198/1 Tenor Solos..Good Bye, Sweet Dreams, Good Bye. But it goes back until at least the 19th and possibly 18th centuries. John Wolcot, writing under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar, used it in his poem "Orson and Ellen; A Legendary Tale" published in 1801: Also from 1801 in The infernal Quixote (Page 287) by Charles Lucas: In the March 1776 of The Universal Magazine was published "The Serenade. A Pastoral Tale. From the German of Gesner" , where the shepherd Daphnis watches over his beloved as she sleeps and sings: The same tale appears in 1776's as Idyl XI, " Daphnis ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Is there a word/phrase for "unperformant"?

As a software engineer, I need to sometimes describe a piece of code as something that lacks performance or was not written with performance in mind. Example: This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. Based on my Google searches, this isn't a real word. What is the correct way to describe this? EDIT My usage of "performance" here is in regard to speed and efficiency. For example, the better the performance of code the faster the application runs. My question and example target the negative definition, which is in reference to preventing inefficient coding practices. Answer This kind of coding style leads to unmaintainable and unperformant code. In my opinion, reads more easily as: This coding style leads to unmaintainable and poorly performing code. The key to well-written documentation and reports lies in ease of understanding. Adding poorly understood words such as performant decreases that ease. In addressing the use of such a poorly ...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are the similarities between the relationships of the characters in The Outsiders and Romeo and Juliet?

At first glance, it might appear as if the characters in  The Outsiders  by S. E. Hinton and  Romeo and Juliet  by William Shakespeare do not have much in common; however, when one isolates the core of the conflicts, it becomes clear that the relationships in both stories are rooted in rivalry and secrecy.  In both  The Outsiders  and  Romeo and Juliet , an overarching theme is rivalry. While   socioeconomic status separates the greasers from the Socs in The Outsiders , last names separates the Montagues from the Capulets, who appear to be relatively equal in terms of socioeconomic status. Due to these rivalries, there are instances of deadly interactions in both stories. In  The Outsiders , Johnny kills Bob (whether his actions were justified or not is debatable). In  Romeo and Juliet , Romeo kills Tybalt and Paris, and Tybalt kills Mercutio. These deaths have profound effects on the main characters. In Ponyboy's case, the Johnny's death and other events in the novel inspire h...
Post a Comment
Read more