by Peter J. Schakel
C. S. Lewis was deeply interested in heaven. In his nonfiction prose he frequently discussed the nature of heaven (and, less frequently, the nature of hell) and explained how to take part in it. In his works of fiction he created several striking descriptions of what heaven (and, in less detail, hell) might be like. Many writers have either discussed or depicted heaven and hell; few have done both well. It can be illuminating to compare the two approaches, to see how Lewis’s discussions of the idea of heaven shape and clarify the images of heaven he created.
It should be noted first that Lewis had not always been interested in heaven and hell. That must have been true during the years (roughly 1913-1929) when he was, or considered himself to be, an atheist. But even when he returned to belief in a divine being, he did so without initially believing in life after death. In his spiritual autobiography,
Surprised by Joy, he says of his conversion to theism that it “involved as yet no belief in a future life.
I now number it among my greatest mercies that I was permitted for several months, perhaps for a year, to know God and to attempt obedience without even raising that question” (chap. 15, par. 2). In Reflections on the Psalms, he expands that idea to the early Hebrews, who had no belief in a future state of any sort; only later, after the people had learned “to desire and adore God” selflessly, could the hope of Heaven and fear of Hell be revealed to them, “as corollaries of a faith already centred upon God” (chap. 4, par. 17). Lewis regards it as a mercy that he became a Christian without believing in heaven because it reassures him about his motive: he did not return to God to obtain a reward, to gain a blissful afterlife in heaven; he did it solely out a desire for God as the source of goodness and truth. Lewis had little sympathy with those who urge people to become Christians in order to avoid hell and instead attain a blissful existence after death (“too often, I am afraid, [heaven is] desired chiefly as an escape from Hell” – Reflections on the Psalms, chap. 4, par. 18).
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