Beyond the Shadowlands (Foreword by Walter Hooper)

C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell

Wayne Martindale

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781433517099
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

Those who know Lewis's work will enjoy Martindale's thorough examination of the powerful images of Heaven and Hell found in Lewis's fiction, and all readers can appreciate Martindale's scholarly yet accessible tone. Read this book, and you will see afresh the wonder of what lies beyond the Shadowlands.

HEAVEN

PART I

DEMYTHOLOGIZING HEAVEN:
THE NONFICTION

1

THE MYTHS OF HEAVEN
EXPOSED

Since you have been raised to new life with Christ, set your sights on the realities of heaven, where Christ sits at God’s right hand in the place of honor and power. Let heaven fill your thoughts. Do not think only about things down here on earth. For you died when Christ died, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. And when Christ, who is your real life, is revealed to the whole world, you will share in all his glory.¹

COLOSSIANS

MYTH #1: HEAVEN WILL BE BORING

No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him.²

—1 CORINTHIANS

I have confessed that for ever so long, Heaven simply held no fascination for me. Why is Heaven (aside from Hell, perhaps) the last place we would want to go? In part, our aversion stems from a fear of what we don’t know and a subsequent clinging to what we do. Heaven must, in the nature of things, remain as mysterious to us in this life as adulthood is to children. Then cultural caricatures of a cloudy hereafter—a colorless, weightless, and (we presume) pleasureless existence, harp-tuned to perfect monotony—effectively turn us away. I’m afraid it creeps up on me still. My problem was a conception of Heaven as church, and church as an endless chain of bad songs and boring sermons with not even a chance of volunteering for nursery duty. How liberating to find that Lewis understood the sentiment: “The picture of Heaven as perpetual worship, a place, in the hideous words of the hymn ‘Where congregations ne’er break up / And Sabbaths have no end,’ which has tormented many a luckless child (finding one Sabbath per week a ration only too liberal!) comes alright when one sees the real meaning: the perpetual worship is the perpetual vision [of God], the perfect exercise of all one’s faculties on the perfect Object.Of that, one cd. [could] never have too much: of its simulacrum, ‘worship’ as we know it down here, one easily can.”³

Paradoxically, my misconceptions about Heaven also came from reading the Bible, but a blinkered reading that carries over the logic of “thou shalt not” to the very architecture of Heaven. For this mind-set, Heaven is only a place of denials where we don’t do this and can’t do that. Or we read too literally the symbolic language and the “no mores” of Heaven. In an important address called “Transposition,” Lewis acknowledges the difficulty of breaking through such misconceptions: “Any adult and philosophically respectable notion we can form of Heaven is forced to deny of that state most of the things our nature desires. . . . Hence our notion of Heaven involves perpetual negations: no food, no drink, no sex, no movement, no mirth, no events, no time, no art.”⁴ Against this thinking, Lewis continues, is the positive vision of God and enjoying him forever. But the positive is at a great disadvantage, since little in our earthly experience suggests it. Further, the five senses have stocked our imaginations with vivid associations from this earthly life, suggesting that home is with the old, comfortable shoes; so we plod on in contented worldliness when we might soar.

My way out of this muddle lay straight through Lewis’s The Great Divorce and (later) Perelandra . These two books hooked me on Heaven.More on these stories later, but never doubt the power of fiction to tell the truth, often better than cold theological prose. Jesus knew this: He constantly taught with stories. It is impossible, I came to see, that Heaven could be boring. Heaven is that place where all that is and all that happens issues from God’s creative genius. In that sense, it is like earth, except that in our present earth even nature groans, waiting for its deliverance from the curse of sin. Do you like earth? You’re going to love Heaven! Do you enjoy earthly pleasures: the taste of cherries, the smell of morning after a rain, the feel of cool water rushing over you as you dive into a pool on a warm summer’s day? Then recall Lewis’s reminder that God through Christ invented all the pleasures. He is the same one who is preparing a place for us and will come again to receive us to himself. The psalmist says, “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.”⁵ In his excellent article on Heaven, Harry Blamires gets it right:

Whatever form your most moving earthly experiences of beauty have taken, they were foretastes of heaven. Wherever you have found loving kindness in human hands and human eyes and human words, you were confronting Christ’s personality operative in God’s creatures. Since the source of all that beauty and all that tenderness is God, the full opening up of his presence before his creatures can be nothing less than the aggregation and concentration and intensification of every loveliness and every goodness we have ever tasted, or even dreamed of. All the love we have ever known in our relationships with others—all that collected and distilled into the personal warmth of him from whom it all derived, and he standing before us: that is the kind of picture that the Christian imagination reaches towards when there is talk of the ultimate reward of the redeemed.⁶

Similarly, when Ransom returns from the unfallen world of Perelandra, having experienced whole new genres of pleasure, and attempts to explain these to his friend, he despairs of the task because words are too vague, imagery not concrete enough. The pleasures are too real for earthly language. As the well-known eighteenth-century hymn writer John Newton puts it:

Fading is the world’s pleasure,
All its boasted pomp and show;
Solid joys and lasting treasure
None but Zion’s children know.⁷

Next to the “solid joys” of Heaven, earth’s are airy, misty will-o’-the-wisps. On the other hand, Hell has no pleasures and offers the world only counterfeits of Heaven’s genuine article. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has senior devil Screwtape lament while cautioning junior tempter Wormwood:

Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden.Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula.⁸

David Fagerberg reminds us of the Devil’s lie, repeated by Screwtape, that “sin affords a more robust variety of pleasure than virtue.”⁹ Even the movies often get right the hatred and murder that flow in the wake of sexual unfaithfulness, whether pursued for physical or egocentric pleasure. In Narnia Edmund learned this lesson the hard way with the White Witch’s candy, the enchanted Turkish Delight: “anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they had killed themselves.”¹⁰ Fagerberg finds in this idea God’s reason for expelling Adam and Eve from the garden: “He wanted to save their lives.” Edmund further learns that “nothing spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.”¹¹ Sinful pleasure infects legitimate ones. Explaining how our desires become Hell-bent, Fagerberg continues, “Our appetites have been misdirected, leading us to believe that there is a contradiction between God’s glory and our own happiness, that we cannot submit our lives to God and still have what we really want.”¹² If we think that, we have believed a lie.

A true and legitimate pleasure is one that sweetens our lives whenever we remember it. An authentic pleasure is one we love to recall and rejoice to share. A part of both Heaven and Hell is this multiplication factor. As memories stack upon memories in Heaven, these will add luster and expansiveness to every new experience—indeed, an experience for one with a perfect memory will never get old but remain “a joy forever,” to borrow from Keats. Lewis imagines such a Heaven-sent pleasure multiplied in the unfallen planet of Malacandra in Out of the Silent Planet. For his first extended time on Malacandra, the space-traveling earthling, Ransom, is mentored by a rational but quite different creature, a hross named Hyoi. Ransom learns from his new friend what must be one of the key ingredients of the increasingly layered richness of our unfolding heavenly experience: the mounding up of memories that are only and always ennobling. Hyoi explains:

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman [human], as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. . . . What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure. . . . When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then—that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?¹³

If this is true of earthly memory, how much more of heavenly memory, which will take not only the good of earth, but the infinite accumulations of Heaven into the celestial memory bank? For this and other reasons, the hrossa are content and embrace each day without regret for the past or anxiety for the future—which itself is an element we long for in heavenly perfection. Hyoi tells Ransom, “every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and . . . these are that day.”¹⁴ Ransom learns a bit of what it means to live life in light of eternity. By contrast, in Hell the memory of evil chosen in this life, joined with whatever issues out of the unredeemed hereafter, will be a mounting horror. What a difference this truth would make in our earthly choices if we could keep it before us. We can see the huge implications for even our earthly lives. This explains the look of contentment and innocence in some people’s faces, however old. They have no regrets dogging their consciences; their sleep is unalloyed. To be so at peace perfectly and always is very Heaven.

Christopher Mitchell reminds us of the function of pleasure: What we experience with our senses “serve in their own God-ordained way to point us to an image of the greater beauty and reality of heaven.”¹⁵ John Piper concurs that “there are merciful foretastes everywhere in this fallen world, and God is glad for us to enjoy them.”¹⁶ A common mistake is trying to grasp these pleasures with all we’re worth, living as if earthly pleasures were our only reality. Lewis sets us right.

The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world: but joy, pleasure, and merriment He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and [pose] an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.¹⁷

Perfection—Boredom ad Infinitum

Everyone knows that Heaven and all in it will be perfect: The Bible says so—and even the biblically illiterate associate perfection with Heaven. The book of Hebrews, the book of “better things,” is chock full of the word perfect and its many forms. For example: “You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem . . . and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect.”¹⁸ We will take up the bothersome idea of being “spirits” in Myth #3, but for now, we will explore the idea of perfection. I have asked several of my classes over the years if they would choose to go to Heaven “two minutes from now” if they could, and sometimes I ask, “if I could do it, who would want me to make them perfect right now?” No small number demur. How would you answer these questions for yourself? You might try this experiment with a group of your own. Usually, most want to stay here and stay as they are. Even those who would choose perfection and Heaven often have a qualm or two about it.Why should that be so?

We are okay with perfection as a goal, but not as a steady state. That’s the problem: a steady state. Perfection implies stagnation for us, a kind of fossilized goodness that goes nowhere. Where could perfection “go,” anyway? It’s already there. This emphasis on the journey, as opposed to the destination, comes to moderns largely from the influence of evolutionary thought: what Lewis calls “the myth of progress.” All of us know that both we and the world are a mess at present; so we console ourselves that the world will be a better place in some distant future. We content ourselves to be on the way, while in earlier eras, most by far focused on the destinatio...