8 ‘Further Up and Further In’: C.S. Lewis on Hope and Heaven
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‘Further Up and Further In’: C.S. Lewis on Hope and Heaven
The Apostles themselves . . . left their mark on Earth precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
It’s our final imagined meeting with Lewis on a cold and misty day in December, at the end of Oxford’s first teaching term. What better topic to end with than the Christian hope? So just what is this hope? What keeps us going in life? What enables us to journey through the shadowlands? What helps us to keep walking through the valley of the shadow of death, without giving in to despair? The answer lies in that little word hope – a word that meant a lot to Lewis, as we shall see.
Hope is rooted in the trustworthiness of God. As Lewis himself knew so well, God can transform the valley of the shadow of death into a gateway of hope. As the great poet John Milton, whom Lewis admired so much, once wrote, hope allows us to bid farewell to fear. Lewis offers us a ‘big picture’ which allows us to see things in a new way. So what does Lewis have to say about the Christian hope?
An American colleague who was visiting Oxford went to see the grave of C.S. Lewis in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry. Over a cup of tea afterwards, we discussed its somewhat forbidding epitaph: ‘Men must endure their going hence.’ My friend was puzzled by the absence of any apparent sense of hope. The inscription seemed to speak of a passive recognition of the inevitability of death. It was an affirmation of human mortality, rather than a celebration of the hope of heaven. Wasn’t Lewis a Christian? So why this melancholy motto, more suggestive of a defiant stoicism than a joyful Christianity?
As far as we can tell, Lewis had no say in the choice of this text, so we can’t blame him for its sonorous tone. It was chosen by Lewis’s elder brother, Warnie, who lived with Lewis in Oxford until his death. Warnie arranged the details of Lewis’s funeral – not very well, as it turned out – including the text on his gravestone. It had been the Shakespearean ‘text for the day’ on the family calendar for 23 August 1908 – the day of their mother’s death from cancer, when Lewis was nearly ten years old. Its grim realism came to express the views of the young Lewis, who became an aggressive atheist, especially when serving as an infantry officer in the Great War. Where was God in the midst of the carnage he saw all around him?
Yet as we have seen, this proved to be a phase in Lewis’s development, not a final resting place. Lewis’s gradual move away from atheism towards Christianity reflected his growing realisation that atheism lacked real intellectual substance and seemed imaginatively impoverished. Lewis had been haunted by a deep intuition that there had to be more to life than what his minimalist atheism allowed. Above all, he found himself reflecting on the implications of a deep and elusive sense of longing, which was heightened rather than satisfied by what he found around him.
Lewis famously termed this experience of yearning ‘Joy’, and came to the conclusion that it pointed to something beyond the boundaries of human knowledge and experience. ‘If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’1 A transcendent realm beyond us – what Christians call ‘heaven’ – would make sense of what he experienced within him and observed around him.
After Lewis’s ‘reconversion’ in 1930, he slowly began to see heaven as more than just a way of making sense of the enigmas and puzzles of this life. It was something that brought Lewis hope. Christian hope, Lewis insisted, was not some ‘form of escapism or wishful thinking’, but was rather ‘a continual looking forward to the eternal world’.2 Hope is a settled state of mind, in which we see this world in its true light and look forward to our final homecoming in heaven. This theme became especially important to Lewis in his final years. Lewis would have echoed Cyprian of Carthage’s famous statement that Paradise is ‘our native land’,3 and shared Cyprian’s hope at the thought of returning to his true homeland. Lewis would want us to share it as well.
So let’s set the context for Lewis’s understanding of the Christian hope by telling the story of the final part of his life.
The Shape of Lewis’s Final Years
The deaths of close friends and relatives are not merely saddening and disturbing. They also remind us of our own mortality. That’s the point famously made by the English poet John Donne in his ‘Meditation 17’. Donne asks us to imagine hearing a funeral bell tolling. This was a familiar aspect of English life in the seventeenth century. The muffled tolling of a church bell marked a death in the local community. Naturally, people would prick up their ears at this sound and wonder who had died. Donne’s point was very simple: ‘Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.’
No man is an island, entire of itself; . . . any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.4
We have already seen how the lingering death of Lewis’s mother in August 1908 shattered the security of his childhood world. Lewis was not even ten years old at the time. The death of his father in 1929 may well have helped Lewis rethink the question of God. While his writings of the period show no interest in God around the time of his father’s death, the question begins to emerge as significant the following year.
Lewis formed a close friendship with Charles Williams, who became a leading member of the Inklings during the period of the Second World War. Williams’s sudden and unexpected death in 1945 affected Lewis deeply. Yet most traumatic of all was the death of Joy Davidman, Lewis’s wife, from cancer in 1960. As we saw in our previous meeting, this unleashed a wave of emotional despair and deep questioning on Lewis’s part.
Each of these deaths, in its own way, prompted Lewis to think about his own mortality. By the time he had written A Grief Observed, Lewis himself was unwell, displaying symptoms of the degenerative illnesses that would eventually kill him. In June 1961, Lewis wrote to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves, thanking him for his visit that summer. Lewis had clearly enjoyed Greeves’s company. Yet there was a cloud on the horizon. Lewis told Greeves that he would soon have to go into hospital for a surgical operation to deal with an enlarged prostate gland.5 Perhaps Greeves would not have been totally surprised by this news. Lewis, he had noted during his visit, ‘was looking very ill’. Something was clearly wrong with him.
Yet Lewis’s doctors quickly realised that things had gone too far for any kind of medical intervention. An operation was impossible. His kidneys and heart were both failing him. His condition could only be managed; it could not be cured. Lewis was going to die. It was just a matter of time.
By the end of the summer of 1961, Lewis was so ill that he was unable to return to Cambridge University to teach. Accepting that he might not live much longer, Lewis drew up his will in November of that year. His doctors were able to stabilise his condition by the spring of the following year, allowing him to resume teaching at Cambridge until June 1963. Encouraged by how things seemed to be going, Lewis arranged to return to Ireland to visit Arthur Greeves. He never made that trip.
When Walter Hooper, who got to know Lewis around this time, arrived at The Kilns on the morning of Sunday 14 July to take Lewis to church, he found Lewis seriously unwell. Lewis was exhausted, scarcely able to hold a cup of tea in his hands, and seemed to be in a state of confusion. Lewis went into an Oxford nursing home the next day, suffered a heart attack almost immediately after his arrival, fell into a coma, and was judged to be close to death.
He recovered enough to be discharged. However, Lewis had no doubts about the inevitable outcome of his rapid decline. With great sadness, he resigned from his Cambridge chair and prepared to spend whatever time remained to him at home at The Kilns. Lewis later told his friends that he wished he had died during his coma at the nursing home. The experience, he later wrote to a friend, was ‘very gentle’. It seemed a shame, ‘having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through’.6 Like Lazarus, he would have to go through the experience again. And it might not be so pleasant or easy the next time.
Lewis died at home at The Kilns on 22 November 1963. There were no warning signs. Warnie noted that Lewis seemed a little tired after lunch, and suggested that he should go to bed. At four o’clock that afternoon, Warnie brought him a cup of tea and found him ‘drowsy but comfortable’. Shortly afterwards, Warnie heard a crash from Lewis’s bedroom. He ran in to find that Lewis had collapsed and was lying unconscious at the foot of the bed. His death certificate would give the multiple causes of his death as renal failure, prostate obstruction and cardiac degeneration. A few hours later, the world learned that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas, Texas.
Warnie was overwhelmed by his brother’s death and sought refuge in drinking large quantities of whisky. While he spent 26 November in bed, recovering from excessive alcohol intake, a small group of friends and colleagues gathered on a cold frosty morning to bury Lewis at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford.
During the summer of 1963, Lewis had written a number of letters dealing with what he believed to be his imminent death. The theme of hope predominates. As we noted, the rather melancholic text Warnie chose for his brother’s gravestone was ‘Men must endure their going hence’. Yet some of Lewis’s own words, written a few months earlier to an American correspondent, express both his style and his hope in the face of his looming death rather better than the somewhat severe and forbidding epitaph chosen by his brother. We are, Lewis suggested, like
a seed waiting in the good earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.7
So let’s explore Lewis’s views on the hope of heaven. It’s a very appropriate way to end our series of imaginary encounters. As this is going to be our final meeting, we’re going to be a little more critical than usual. We’re going to look at some concerns related to Lewis’s ideas about heaven, and see what he would say in response.
Lewis’s Views on Heaven: Some Misgivings
Let’s open by looking at some words that Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: ‘It is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it.’8 Many of Lewis’s readers find this idea perplexing – especially when Lewis commented that he still held that view ‘most strongly’. Why did Lewis think that the mere existence of heaven is more important than any hope of entering it? Let’s ask Lewis to unpack his meaning, and see if we can make sense of what he is saying.
Lewis developed this idea during the period of his ‘New Look’ – the time during the 1920s when he was trying to sort himself out intellectually.9 Lewis became interested in a form of philosophical idealism which emphasised the importance of a transcendent dimension to life, or the recognition of a transcendent principle. That’s one of the core themes of his ‘argument from morality’. Unless there is some transcendent ground of justice – which we find, of course, in the Christian doctrine of God – then our notions of justice are simply human inventions, reflecting the views of those with power and influence.
Now, most of us will agree with Lewis on this point. Indeed, it is a very powerful apologetic argument, which has been rejected but not refuted by some irritated atheists. Yet we still feel uneasy. We can agree with Lewis about the importance of a transcendent being or place. But surely there is more to the Christian view of heaven than just accepting that it exists!
There is a serious issue here. Many scholars have argued that Lewis’s early vision of heaven was perhaps as much Platonic as it was Christian.10 For example, consider the words that Lewis places in the mouth of Lord Digory towards the end of The Last Battle: ‘It’s all in Plato, all in Plato: bless me, what do they teach them at these schools!’11 Lord Digory is trying to explain that the ‘Old Narnia’, which had a historical beginning and end, was really ‘only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here’.12 A central theme of many of Lewis’s writings is that we live in a world that is a ‘bright shadow’ of something greater and better. The present world is a ‘copy’ or ‘shadow’ of a real world. The old Narnia was a shadow or a copy of the ‘new Narnia’ or the ‘real Narnia’, just as England and our world are shadows or copies of something in heaven.
Lewis seems to have understood the idea of heaven as a kind of sense-making device which helped to give coherence to the world of thought and experience. For most of the 1940s and 1950s, Lewis exulted primarily in the ability of the Christian faith to make sense of reality. Christianity gave coherence to the world. It helped us realise that there is a big picture which makes sense of the snapshots. And, as Lewis showed us in the Chronicles of Narnia, Christianity tells a ‘big story’ that allows us to see our own story in a new way.
Let’s look at Plato’s ideas in a little more detail. We’ve already looked at the analogy that appealed so much to Lewis – the people in the cave (see page 68). The unfortunate inhabitants of the dark, smoky cave think it is the only world. As far as they are concerned, there is nothing beyond it. But what if there is a world beyond the cave? If there is such a world, we would see the cave in a very different way. We would realise that we live in a very limited world of shadows and smoke.
That’s why Lewis uses the image of God as a ‘sun’ that lights up the world. Or heaven as a realm beyond the limits of present human experience, yet which our deepest intuitions and experiences have pointed us towards. Occasionally these realities break into our dark world – like light through the chinks of the Second World War blackout curtains (see pages 143–4) – brightening our minds with the truth. Glimpsing them is like hearing the sound of music faintly, coming from across the distant hills. Or catching the scent of a far-off flower, wafted by a passing breeze. Lewis came to see such experiences as ‘arrows of Joy’, wake-up calls to discover and experience a deeper vision of reality. Yet this picture is rather different from the New Testament’s idea of heaven as an utter transformation of this world, which takes place at the end of time!
The New Testament develops two interrelated themes. First, the Christian faith shows us the way things really are. This is about revelation, coming to see things properly. But revelation alone doesn’t change our situation. Christianity doesn’t just tell us that we are sinful; it offers forgiveness. It doesn’t just tell us that we are in prison; it throws open the doors so that we can go free. This is what the New Testament calls salvation, the second theme. To use a medical analogy, the gospel offers both diagnosis (revelation) and cure (salvation). It helps us to grasp our true situation, but it also declares that our situation can be transformed, and it makes that transformation possible.
At many points in his writings, Lewis tends to think of Christianity as a means of intellectual transformation. Christianity helps us to see things as they really are. Now that’s an important part of the Christian faith. And we can probably understand why an Oxford academic such as Lewis would warm to the idea of the intellectual enrichment brought to life by the Christian faith. But there’s a lot more to the gospel than this!
So how might Lewis respond to these concerns? Let’s find out.
Lewis’s Rich Understanding of Heaven
Lewis would concede that the concerns we have just noted are fair. Yet he would ask us to appreciate that his understanding of heaven is richer and deeper than our discussion suggests. He makes this point clear in Miracles, one of his most meticulously argued books. Let’s look at what he says there.
We need to get away from the ridiculous idea that heaven is nothing more than eternal harp playing! There are three main ways in which we use the word heaven, Lewis explains. The first sense of the word is ‘the unconditioned Divine Life beyond all worlds’.13Heaven here means something like ‘Utter Reality’ or ‘reality itself’. This is the notion of heaven to which Lewis refers when he declares, ‘It is more important that Heaven should exist than that any of us should reach it.’ There really is an ultimate reality. How we get into it is a secondary question. If there is no ultimate reality, it’s pointless to think about how we might get there.
But Lewis would want to caution us at this point. We naturally think of heaven as a place – a somewhere. Yet Lewis points out that while this may be the way in which we think of heaven, it is not the way heaven really is. Heaven is totally non-spatial and non-temporal. Even saying that heaven is ‘where’ God is shows that we need spatial images to think about heaven. But it’s not a place. It’s ultimate reality – something so great that we just can’t take it in properly, and have to use images based on the world that we know. So we think of heaven as a place, simply because that’s the only analogy that lies to hand.
The second sense of heaven is being in the presence of God. In this sense, we can think of heaven as our ‘true country’, even though it isn’t really a ‘country’ at all. Heaven is about being with God, not necessarily about being with God in a specific place. Once more, Lewis emphasises how dependent we are on images to visualise heaven, and how this leads us to assume that it is a ‘place’.
Finally, Lewis identifies a third sense of heaven – the place in which our new bodies will live after the resurrection. Once more, Lewis notes that we simply cannot avoid using spatial language to speak about heaven. We think of it as the place where God is, and the place where we shall one day be as well. Yet Lewis makes it clear at a number of points that it is only the created order that is characterised by time and space. To be in heaven is to step outside a world of space and time into eternity – a timeless place, which we find virtually impossible to think of, except in terms of images of places.
Now that Lewis has set out his rich vision of heaven, it’s easy to see how its three components are linked together. Yet by the 1940s, Lewis had embraced a deeper vision of heaven. While he never lost sight of the idea that heaven helps us make sense of what we experience and observe on earth, the idea of entering heaven and experiencing its joy became increasingly important to him. Some lines from The Last Battle, the concluding novel of the Chronicles of Narnia, capture this point particularly well. On seeing the ‘new Narnia’, the Unicorn declares: ‘I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.’14 For Lewis, the Christian hope is about returning home to where we really belong.
Does this mean that Lewis exults in death? Is he a ‘world-denying’ writer, who treats this world as devoid of value? No. For Lewis, this world is where we have been placed. It is God’s world, and is to be valued, appreciated and enjoyed. Yet it is studded with clues that it is not our real home, that there is a still better world beyond its frontiers, that one may dare to hope to enter and inhabit this better place. Lewis affirms the delight, joy and purposefulness of life. He asks us to realise that, when this finally comes to an end, something even better awaits us.
One of the best statements of Lewis’s view about the Christian hope is found in the 1941 sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’. Lewis explains that our imaginations have been taken captive by a lie. As we discovered in an earlier meeting with Lewis, he was deeply concerned that his generation had come to believe that the notion of transcendent realms or of worlds to come was simply illusion, which could not be taken seriously by modern educated people. Heaven is so yesterday. We now know (or so we are told) that the true destiny of humanity is ‘found on this earth’15 – and nowhere else.
Lewis demands that we protest against this distorted and degraded vision of life, and help people break free of its lure. The Christian churches need to break this spell and liberate the world from this demeaning and impoverishing belief, which is presented as if it were fact. The secular world offers people only a hopeless end; instead, Lewis wants them to see and grasp the endless hope of the Christian faith and live in its light.
To ‘aim at Heaven’, as Lewis says in Mere Christianity, is not to neglect this world or earthly concerns. Rather, it is to raise our horizon and elevate our expectations – and then to behave on earth in the light of this greater reality. We must infuse earth with the fragrance of heaven. The true believer is not someone who disengages from this world in order to focus on heaven, but rather the one who tries to make this world more like heaven. Lewis is surely right here. The Christian vision of heaven has driven many to improve this world. ‘The Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.’16
Lewis is no killjoy. He does not ask us to deny that we experience desire in this life, nor does he suggest that these desires are evil or a distraction from the real business of life. His point is that our desires cannot be, and were never meant to be, satisfied by earthly pleasures alone. They are ‘good images’ or signposts of something ‘further up and further in’. They are foretastes of the true source of satisfaction that we will find in the presence of God. For Lewis, heaven is the ‘other country’ for which we were created in the first place. We should ‘make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same’.17
So what happens if we get things wrong? What if we fail to realise that something we really value and love is a ‘copy, or echo, or mirage’ of something heavenly, and confuse ‘the thing itself’ with what it suggests? Lewis leaves us in little doubt. We will become frustrated and cynical. We turn a good signpost into a false idol, confusing a sign with what it points to. And when a pleasure is corrupted in this kind of way, it ends up a vice.
This is our last imagined meeting with Lewis. What parting thought would Lewis leave with us? There are so many things he might say. He might suggest that we imagine the most delightful experience we have ever had, and then tell us that heaven is just like that – only bigger and better. But I think he might leave us with the thought that we find towards the end of The Last Battle. Like many other Christian writers before him, Lewis declares that the hope of heaven enables us to see this world in its true perspective. This life is the preparation for that greater reality. It is but the cover and title page of the ‘Great Story’, in which every chapter is ‘better than the one before’.18
For Lewis, we are part of that ‘Great Story’. Our own stories are given new meaning and value when they are woven into the greater story of God, and when we discover that each of us is ‘a real ingredient in the divine happiness’.19 Lewis’s final challenge to us might be this: What is your role in that story? And are you playing it to the full? And with those words, Lewis would leave us, putting on his hat and coat, and heading into the misty distance as he walked back to Oxford.
As he finally disappeared from view in the fading winter sunlight, we might reflect on the way in which Lewis found his own place in that ‘Great Story’. In the early 1920s, Lewis hoped to be remembered as an atheist poet, whose bitter and forceful condemnations of an uncaring and absent God would rid the world of any lingering religious belief. Today, he is remembered as one of the greatest Christian apologists of all time. He has become an ingredient of that greater story, and an encouragement to us to find our own place.
Lewis: The Legacy
When my biography of Lewis was published in 2013, I began to receive a large number of letters and messages. Some expressed delight about the biography. A few suggested some helpful corrections. Some writers told me about their own experiences of Lewis. But the vast majority were about the impact that Lewis had had on the writers. These people wanted to share with me the way in which Lewis had transformed and enriched their lives, especially their faith. Lewis himself would have had no idea of how significant an influence he would be for so many after his death.
So as we end this series of conversations, let us appreciate that Lewis is not simply someone who helps us think about our faith. He is someone who challenges us to think about the difference that we make to others – the memories we will leave behind us, and lives that are changed through our influence. Only now can we begin to appreciate the full extent of Lewis’s legacy. But what will ours be? Who will remember us? And why?
When I was researching my biography of Lewis, I came across many photographs of Lewis and his friends from the 1910s and 1920s. Some showed Lewis in small groups of people; others in larger gatherings. It was easy to identify Lewis himself and some of those who played an important role in his life – such as his father, his brother and his childhood friend Arthur Greeves. But time after time, I could not identify some of the other people in the photographs. Nor could any of those I consulted, who had expert knowledge of Lewis’s family history. All too often, I had to pencil the word ‘unknown’ against my copies of these images. Whoever these people were, we do not know their names. We probably never will.
Yet it was obvious from the photographs that they were important members of Lewis’s circle of family and friends. Once they mattered; now they were forgotten, reduced to anonymous traces on photographic paper. Their memory and identity had simply faded out of history, like the ink on a piece of writing paper being washed away by a spilled glass of water. Memory is fragile. We are so easily forgotten. Lewis is one of the few who have left footprints on history – footprints by which he will be remembered.
Yet Lewis himself might helpfully remind us at this point that the most important thing is that each of us, whether remembered by others or not, is remembered by God. And that’s what really matters. Human history may forget about us, as it has forgotten so many. But our names are engraved on God’s hands and written in the Book of Life – a fitting, even inspiring, thought with which to end our series of conversations with Lewis about the meaning of life.
