Last issue, Jeff discussed Solzhenitsyn’s beliefs about the meaning of life. This issue, he examines C.S. Lewis’s fanciful vision of heaven and hell. 

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hat will heaven really be like? Will we have angel wings and play musty muzak on golden harps? Will it be a cloudy, fluffy existence, or a thing too sharp for words? Most importantly, will there be base ball in heaven ? C.S. Lewis answers none of these questions in his frequently overlooked classic, The Great Divorce. Though the novel describes an imaginary visitor’s impressions of heaven and hell (something of a modernized Dante), it does very little to clear up the usual questions about eternity. In fact, Lewis emphatically denies any special knowledge about the after-life: “[This is] not even a guess or a specula ti on at what may actually await us.” Why, then, does he bother? What can Lewis hope to accomplish by showing us two places he knows he cannot describe?

As with any Lewis book, the answer is not simplistic or glib. Lewis wants his readers to discover a number of truths. The Great Divorce contains profound truths about arrogance, art, lust, and supernaturalism, but its central truth is closely tied to heaven and hell: in the end, man can only choose between one of two options.

Lewis describes the choice this way: “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.”‘ It’s the most important choice any person can make: Is Jesus Christ the Lord of the universe, or am I?

As every Christian knows, the way you answer that question determines your companionship for eternity: you can be surrounded by small, grasping pseudogods or the one true Father. Your decision puts you in heaven or hell.

By guiding us through these opposite eternities, Lewis helps us to see how foundational that decision really is. We realize that our entire worldview-the way we perceive all of reality-hinges on that one basic assumption. Will we serve God or serve ourselves? Do we belong to the world or to Christ? If we live consistently with our choice, our entire life will reflect the Christian worldview or the worldview of hopelessness.

Lewis helps us to see this by opening his story in hell-though the reader isn’t immediately aware of the location. Fire and brimstone are strangely absent; instead of flames and devils with pointy tails, the reader is surrounded by a drab city quite similar to the drab cities of earth. The people are grumpy, of course, but no grumpier than the more practiced humbugs in our world. Really, there is little reason to expect you’re in hell.

At least, there’s little reason until the bus our guide boards turns out to be a flying bus. At that point, the departure point and the destination become obvious rather quickly, as fellow passengers provide significant clues. We soon realize that men and women who find themselves in hell may board this bus and travel to heaven. If they wish, they may even stay in heaven. What an opportunity! As our guide steps off the bus, we see a paradise peopled with majestic beings surrounded by towering waterfalls, staggering cliffs and mountains, and gorgeous wildlife. Far in the distance, there’s an occasional glimpse of a heavenly city.

But there’s a catch. Heaven, it turns out, is all-too-painfully real for the inhabitants of hell. Blades of grass cut like knives into their feet. The water is too real to wade in or drink. Flowers weigh more than the inhabitants of hell can lift. They have been trapped in the unreality of self-worship; the real worldview-the way things really are-is too real for them to bear.

Is this a cruel trick? Did the inhabitants of hell travel to heaven only to be tortured by their surroundings?

Yes and no. Yes, their surroundings will torture them for a time, but gradually they may grow accustomed to reality. The majestic inhabitants of heaven promise the visitors that they will eventually thrive in paradise, if the visitors will be brave enough to abandon their self-worship and trust in Christ. Unfortunately, self-worship is habit-forming. Of all the unsaved characters we meet in this novel, only one turns from his sin and is saved. The rest respond to God’s grace in arrogance and fear, providing a tragically familiar caricature of sinful attitudes.

Do you wrestle with greed? You’ll see your sinful tendency played out poignantly by the calculating little man who hopes to steal golden apples from heaven, so that he can sell them in hell. Is vanity ever a temptation for you? The horror of that mindset is modeled by the ghost from hell who is too embarrassed to walk among the majestic heavenly beings. With each turn, the reader is confronted by another ghost and another symptom of the same disease: choosing to worship self rather than God. The choice becomes more and more appalling as the novel progresses-we see people casting away boundless joy for the chance to return to hell to nurse a pet sin.

Why, we ask as we read, would a person throw a way everything for the sake of avoiding God? How can these ghosts be so stupid?

Reading further, we discover the painful truth: we are not so different from the ghosts. In the light of eternity, our own stubbornness about our pet sins looks increasingly unwise. Why would a person throwaway everything to avoid spending eternity with God? Well, why are we so quick to brush aside God here on earth? Why do we cling to our own sins when we will someday be faced with two opposite eternities?

This is the tension Lewis wants to create. If we really believe—really—that our time on earth is barely a heartbeat in light of an eternity either in heaven or hell, why can’t we get this heartbeat right? Why don’t we live like we’re just a step away from heaven?

Each one of us must face this question ourselves. There is no instant solution. As Christians, we are guaranteed that we will enter the kingdom of God; we are not, however, guaranteed that we will lead sinless lives on earth. Christ has set us free from sin and given us the chance to be slaves to righteousness {Romans 6: 18), and that is glorious good news. But we must seize the opportunity. Christ will not live our lives for us-we must be willing to use the freedom He gives us.

Too often we spurn this freedom for the pleasure of a moment. Like the hellish ghosts, we are quick to believe Satan’s basic lie, the lie that seduced Eve in Eden: “[Y]ou will be like God.” (Genesis 3:5)

Though we have freedom from sin, we can only exercise that freedom when we remember Who is God. Whenever we allow ourselves to believe Satan’s little whisper, we place ourselves in control and invariably make bad decisions. Giving God control is not a one time decision.

Though our eternal home is guaranteed by our first submission to Christ as Savior, our earthly thoughts and actions will be hopelessly misguided unless we submit to Christ anew each day. In other words, to live consistently as Christians here and now, we must die to ourselves daily. This is not an abdication of responsibility; it is an act of faith, and of courage.

“Courage,” says G.K. Chesterton, “is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not apiece of mysticism for saints...” Rather, says Chesterton, it is true for every man. To save his life, a man must “seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. “ Put simply, the Christian must ever cast himself off the throne, and lay his life before the right Ruler of the universe.

And he must do it now. The Great Divorce sounds the clanging alarm: when you reach heaven or hell, it will be too late. Your decision will have been made. It is only here, on earth today, that men and women can answer the most basic question—Am I God, or is God God?

Lewis’s tour through heaven and hell ends in neither locale. Instead, we find our narrator/guide “in a cold room, hunched on the floor beside a black and empty grate, the clock striking three, and the siren howling overhead.” Like us, he is on earth, in a less-than-paradisiacal setting, but with a warning siren sounding clearly: choose to serve the proper Master, and serve Him every day. If you submit yourself to Him constantly, you will—finally—leave the sirens far behind, and instead hear the highest tribute, the only praise worth seeking: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Each issue Jeff assigns a piece of literature for students to read.  We encourage you to use his recommendations and his commentary in the upcoming issue as a part of your study of literature.  Serious students should read A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare before the next issue of New Attitude arrives.