Hope Made Certain

by Christopher Assenza
In the chapter on Hope, Lewis makes fun of those who reject the Christian idea of Heaven because they don’t want to spend eternity playing harps. “The answer to such people,” he says, “is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them” (p. 121). What is Lewis’s conception of Heaven? What is his view on the right relation between this world and the next? Why does he feel we should we “aim at Heaven” rather than at earth? (p. 119).

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes that if we have a desire – a longing for something – satisfaction for that desire must exist: “[a] baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.” That hunger is a desire and food its answer does not imply that a baby who hungers will always be fed, but it does mean that there is an actual way to satisfy the longing; and, for Lewis, this rule applies to all desires, whether simple (e.g., thirst) or complex (e.g., love). Although a reasonable position, it leaves a difficult question: if we accept the premise that all our desires can indeed be satisfied, what of the desires we have for which no satisfaction is to be found on Earth?

Lewis’s answer to this question is one of the central themes of his life’s work: our desires were never meant to be satisfied by earthly pleasures alone; instead, they lead us to something “further up and further in,” to the true source of satisfaction found only in the presence of God, or more succinctly: in Heaven. Heaven is where we come into complete and unceasing union with our Creator and yet also become most fully ourselves. It is the “far-off country” for which we were fearfully and wonderfully made. In “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis lists five promises about Heaven in Scripture: “(1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have ‘glory’; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe.”

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